Antoine Hennion - The Passion For Music

The Passion for Music:
A Sociology of Mediation
Music and Change:
Ecological Perspectives
Series Editors:
Gary Ansdell, Director of Education, Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, UK

Professor Tia DeNora, Department of Sociology & Philosophy, HuSS,
University of Exeter, UK
Series Advisory Board:
Kenneth Aigen, Temple University, USA

Jane Davidson, University of Western Australia
Timothy Dowd, Emory University, USA
Lucy Green, Institute of Education, UK
Lee Higgins, Boston University College of Fine Arts, USA
Raymond MacDonald, Edinburgh University, UK
Mercédès Pavlicevic, Nordoff Robbins, UK
Even Ruud, University of Oslo, Norway
Brynjulf Stige, University of Bergen, Norway
Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives, is a cross-disciplinary, topic-led series

for scholars and practitioners. Its aim is to explore the question of how, where and
when music makes a difference. If music is a dynamic ingredient of change, what
are the processes and mechanisms associated with music’s powers, and how can
ecological perspectives help us to understand music in action? Book proposals are
welcome in any of the following areas: healthcare, social policy, political activism,
psychiatry, embodiment, mind and consciousness, community relations, education
and informal learning, management and organizational cultures, trauma, memory
and commemoration, theories of action, self-help, conflict and conflict resolution,
the life course, spirituality and religion, disability studies, palliative care, social
criticism, governance, resistance, protest, and utopian communities.
Published titles in the series
Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life

Tia DeNora
How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life

Gary Ansdell
The Passion for Music:
A Sociology of Mediation
Antoine Hennion
Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines – CNRS;
Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, France
Translated by
Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
copyright © 2015 Antoine Hennion, Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier

Antoine Hennion, Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author and translators of
this work.
Originally published in French as La passion musicale by Antoine Hennion (Editions
Métailié, 1993).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hennion, Antoine.
[Passion musicale. English]
The passion for music : a sociology of mediation / by Antoine Hennion ; translated by
Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier.
pages cm. -- (Music and change: ecological perspectives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-1810-4 (hardcover) 1. Music--Philosophy and aesthetics. 2.
Aesthetics. 3. Music--Social aspects. I. Rigaud, Margaret, translator. II. Collier, Peter,
1942-, translator. III. Title.
ML3845.H5313 2015
306.4'842--dc23
2014042700
ISBN 9781472418104 (hbk)

Contents
List of Figures vii

Preface to the English Edition ix
Introduction 1
1 Lasting Things: Durkheim as a Founding Father of the

Sociology of Culture 15
Transition Restoring the Mediators: One Method for Two Programmes 39
2 Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art 45
3 Sociology and the Art Object: Belief, Illusion, Artefacts 69
4 The Social History of Art: Reinserting the Works into Society 101
5 The New History of Art: The Social in the Art Work 119
Transition Linear Causes or Circular Causalities? 153
6 The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals 165
Transition ‘Unhappy Music’ Which ‘Fade[s] Away as Soon as It Is

Born’…: Painting-and-Objects versus Music-and-Society? 209
7 ‘What Can You Hear?’: An Ethnographic Study of a

Solfège Lesson 221
Transition Music as a Theory of Mediation 245
8 ‘Bach Today’ 247
Intermezzo A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall … 261
9 Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity 267

vi The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation
Conclusion: The Representation of Music: In Praise of Musical Artifice 281
Epilogue ‘Vor deinen Thron’… 295
Bibliography 303
Index 331
List of Figures
1.1 The square of belief 25

1.2 The circle of causalities 31
5.1 A global, circular causality 154

5.2 Partial, linear causalities 155
5.3 The Object, the Social, partial causes: a triangle
enclosing mediations 158
7.1 A classroom 223

7.2 Time 1, An indifferent class: What does he want? 227
7.3 Time 2, A heckling class: We’d rather laugh together! 228
7.4 Time 3, An inter-ested class: Mediators have entered the place … 233
7.5 Bouncing back against the envelope … 234
7.6 … or entering it 234
7.7 Time 4, A crystallised class: Music is appearing … 237
7.8 The children’s musical stave 240
C.1 A given world, or a world still to be done? 282

Preface to the English Edition
This book is the translation of La Passion musicale, first published in 1993,

comprehensively revised and rewritten. The book itself derived from a doctoral
thesis entitled ‘La Médiation musicale’ (EHESS 1991). It was translated into
Spanish in 2003. A new, revised and corrected, edition of La Passion musicale
appeared in 2007. Over the years, several ultimately unsuccessful attempts were
made to translate it into English. This created a rather curious situation. Although
my research was becoming known to English readers through translated papers
of mine or publications which referenced my work, one of their main sources
remained inaccessible to English-speaking readers. It is for this reason that I am
so pleased to welcome this edition. I express my gratitude particularly towards the
colleagues, translators and publishers whose efforts have led to its publication,
first and foremost Tia de Nora, who has worked with such conviction over the
years to bring this project to fruition.
It is both satisfying and frustrating to look back over a text whose first version
is 20 years old. Although I was thankfully often reassured by my arguments, there
were some which retrospectively I regret not having developed further in the book.
Conversely, I feel some remorse on detecting signs of equally interesting lines of
research which I have never taken further. I felt a strong urge to censor a clumsy
argument here, add a helpful reference there, or complete an unfinished debate.
And even sometimes to start all over again …. I have tried to resist this temptation.
It would not have been the same book: a book belongs to its time. Its insights,
arguments and conclusions, but also its blind spots and obsessions, are part of its
baggage. They no longer belong to the author.
In revising the text, I have adopted the stance of an editor. Above all, I wanted
to make it more fluent, while staying close to the mission of La Passion musicale,
which was to present a broad argument, with far-reaching implications. The book
seeks to redefine the sociology of music, taking as its theme and material the
complex relationships between the social sciences and the arts. It proceeds by
comparing and contrasting the sociology of music with art history, the social
history of art, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of arts other than
music. In the original edition, I felt it was necessary to include a large number
of case studies, in order to strike the right balance between theoretical analysis
and empirical study. Some of these case studies have dated, while others were
elaborated for separate publication. It seems to me now more helpful to show the
relevance and the pertinence of the argument by focusing this new edition on the
book’s central premise: elaborating a theory of mediation. I chose to focus on the
case studies – the reinterpretation of Baroque music, the ethnographical study of
x The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation
a music lesson, the account of a rock concert – which helped to formulate and
concretely illustrate the implications of the book’s argument, while maintaining
the balance between theory and practice. Conversely, this criterion also led me to
include in this edition two texts which derived from my work following the first
publication of La Passion musicale: the first is on the love for Bach in nineteenth-
century France, and the second on music lovers today. Although not centrally
concerned with Bach in this book, I am delighted to end on a composer who over
the next few years inspired so much of my research and conversations with Joël-
Marie Fauquet, culminating in the publication of La Grandeur de Bach in 2000.
I am also aware of the inadequacies involved in a revised edition. The field
has grown since then, particularly in the areas of rock studies, cultural studies,
material culture, and performance, while it has hardly evolved in other areas, no
less significantly. It seemed pointless to update the bibliography, except for a few
omissions or additions. I take full responsibility for the choices I make in this book,
such as my decision to focus my examples and historical arguments on classical
music: my works on popular and rock music date from the 1980s (Vignolle and
Hennion 1978, Hennion 1981, 1983b, 1989, Mignon and Hennion 1991), and
many of them have been translated. I regret nonetheless that it was not possible to
include the works of critical musicologists, as well as for instance those of Berliner
(1994) and DeVeaux (1997) on jazz, or those of younger colleagues – some of
whom attended my research seminar – on the disc, jazz, art music, rap or other
contemporary musical forms. I am also sorry that I could not refer as much as I
would have liked to DeNora’s works, from those on Beethoven to her research on
music in everyday life, which have taken on even greater resonance since then and
chime so well with the premise of this book.
On a theoretical level, the arguments I develop in La Passion musicale have
become increasingly important for my research. This led to my work on music
lovers (Hennion, Maisonneuve and Gomart 2000) and, in collaboration with
Geneviève Teil, to a stronger expression of my reflexive approach to taste and
to the pragmatics of attachment (Teil and Hennion 2004, Hennion 2004, 2007,
2010a). My aim in this revised edition was therefore not merely to make the book
more concise and more sharply focused. With the passage of time, I have found
it easier to realise how very ambitious the scope of its overall argument is, and to
embrace it proudly, while still acknowledging its limits. Despite its shortcomings,
I believe it is my most original contribution to the field.
I wish to thank first and foremost Tia DeNora, for her crucial support. Among
others, Pete Peterson (who died in 2010), Raymonde Moulin, Howie Becker, Vera
Zolberg, Georgina Born, David Looseley, Serge Proulx, Line Grenier, Michèle
Lamont have been very helpful in making my work more widely known in the
English-speaking world before the publication of this book. I also wish to thank
the many other colleagues who have invited me to present and discuss my work
from the outset of this intellectual adventure. I hope that those I forget will forgive
me, but I do want to cite David Stark, Victoria Johnson, Chandra Mukerji, Jacques
Cheyronnaud, Paul DiMaggio, John Law and Tom Ertman. I am especially
Preface to the English Edition xi
grateful to my friends and colleagues at the CSI, who were so closely involved
in this project that I consider them more as co-authors than as sounding boards.
Some of them were involved from the very beginning, including Lucien Karpik,
Jean-Pierre Vignolle, Michel Callon, followed by Madeleine Akrich, Cécile
Méadel, Bruno Latour, and others. Finally, I owe a pleasant debt of gratitude to
my immediate collaborators, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Émilie Gomart, Geneviève
Teil, and to the students, colleagues and friends who gave me so much, from the
time of the exuberant adventure of the journal Vibrations. Revue d’études des
musiques populaires (1984–88) to my later research seminar at the CSI ‘Aimer la
musique’, with J.-M. Fauquet and G. Teil (1997–2007), which has now become
‘Attachements’. And an infinite debt of another sort to Christine.
I owe to them all that is best in this book and I alone am responsible for any
shortcomings.
Introduction
Music itself (is) the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the
various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969, Introduction, p. 18
The subject of this book is changeable, like that of music. It aims to draw up a
sociology of the passion for music while respecting its specific mediations, without
allowing instruments of analysis to overshadow the reality analysed. Conversely,
it also attempts to elaborate a theory of mediation from what music teaches us. In
order to do this, it makes a detailed survey of how the social sciences (especially
sociology, art history and social history) have treated the work of art, its ‘context’
and their interaction. One of the driving forces throughout this book is the desire
to resolve this problem by comparing the very different cases of the visual arts
and music.
The Elusive Object of Music
It is difficult to define the object of music since it cannot be located in matter.

Music must always produce its object through a proliferation of intermediaries,
interpreters, instruments and media which are needed to make it appear in the
midst of musicians and audiences. It is constantly being recreated, constituting a
whole theory of mediation in practice. The social sciences find themselves facing
the opposite situation. Handling the objects already constituted by the actors, such
as works of art, presents them with a serious problem: what is to be done with
them? Are they symbols, and if so of what? Or are they snares and delusions?
Or are they means of producing social reality? Whereas, in the case of music,
mediation makes objects appear, the social scientist uses mediation in order to
brush objects aside – here, the works of art: he only takes them into account in
order to explain them in terms of something other than themselves, to turn them
into tools for social interpretation. This book is a response to the symmetrical
opposition between musical mediation, understood as a model for the collective
construction of an object, and its mirror image: the model proposed by the social
analysis of objects, especially in the visual arts, which on the contrary treats works
of art as a mediation of the social.
I do not intend to directly compare the musical object, which exists in time
and movement, and demands a proliferation of intermediaries, with the stable
object of the visual arts, which overshadows its mediators. Instead, I wish to
highlight the contrast between the two bodies of critical literature they have
2 The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation
produced. The stability of a statue or a painting naturally dictates the critical

posture which sociologists have adopted: instead of this confrontation between
an object of aesthetic delight and a subject keen to attribute the source of its
beauty to the quality of the object and his own sensibility as an art lover, all that
sociologists have to do is reinstate the many hidden mediators which alone make
this relationship possible, from frame, institution and dealer, through to critics,
taste and social distinction. Directly imported from the Durkheimian model of the
totem, mediation draws attention to the filter that lies between the subject and the
object, and makes it possible for them to see each other. Once sociologists have
identified this screen, they were able to attribute the qualities that actors attribute
to objects to underlying social mechanisms.
However, sociologists constantly find themselves confronted with the stubborn
resistance of art objects, the value of which cannot so easily be reduced to their
theories. When it comes to providing their own interpretation, they seem to feel
obliged to choose between arguing that the art object is irreducible, ‘in the last
analysis’, or else reduce it to an illusion, by making it the arbitrary stake of a social
construction. In this way, he reinstates the opposition which he was supposed to
overcome, between the discourse which validates the object, and the discourse
which subordinates it to collective belief:
Of all the different sociological studies of value, it is probably the sociology of

art which is the most radically confronted with the limitations of the sociologistic
account, if only because the hypothesis that the specific structures of the work
are negligible compared with its effects or social uses, disintegrates immediately
when faced with the facts. (J.-C. Passeron, p. 458, in Moulin 1986a, pp. 449–59)
Can social interpretations ever respect the specific processes of construction of

the fields they analyse, or do theoretical explanations by definition imply the
rejection of mediation? After a long period of resistance, the social sciences,
confronted with art, have almost unanimously – as we shall see – reached two
conclusions on the need to reject dualism:
1. It is important to overcome the opposition between internal and external

analysis, between aestheticism and sociologism, and between social
interpretation of and denial of the object.
2. This means carefully taking into account the specific mediations of art, both
in terms of their theoretical status and of their empirical manifestations,
whether these are material, discursive, bodily, or institutional.
Nevertheless, this does not fully clarify and explain the meaning and the place we
allocate to the mediations of art. One of the aims of this book is to gain a better
understanding of these questions, using the example of music and exploiting the
rich network of heterogeneous mediations which this art depends on.
Introduction 3
Music’s Distaste for Critical Discourse
Music does present us with a difficult, ambivalent, case. Critical discourse needs
to rely on the solidity of the very object it denounces, but music wrong-foots it,
since there is no object to demystify in this case. On the contrary, its interpreters
and its instruments are the only visible witnesses to its existence. So elusive is the
object of the art of music that it has instead tended to make its critics feel obliged to
come to its rescue, and establish its reality beyond the overbearing presence of its
intermediaries: all we see are instruments, scores, media, languages, institutions,
interpreters and teachers. So the problem is that, seeing music beyond them means
not so much drawing attention to these mediators – as art historians have been
doing with increasing skill in the case of painting – but getting rid of them. As a
result, critics have no option but to keep repeating the obvious: no musical object
can exist without the collective work involved in making it appear. And in fact
neither of the sociologist’s usual suspects – unmasking the illusory nature of
the object, and revealing its hidden mediators – can help to solve the mystery of
the object. It is easy to understand why sociologists have lavishly written about
painting but have fallen silent in the presence of music.
Although the days of all-encompassing critical discourses are over, music
offers sociology a way forward: no longer an outcast from language, no longer
the abandoned child of the object and the critic, no longer the poor relative of
the dualism of subject-object, music is now an ideal art form for the sociologist
seeking to unravel mediation. Mediation moves to the forefront, and it is now the
appearance of the work and musical pleasure which have become mysterious. This
reversal is also a new synthesis requiring a new theory: wasn’t this how things were
always supposed to be? Wasn’t the logic of the sociologists’ critical paradox rather
odd, starting from the obviousness of an object that nobody considers obvious,
and revealing the mysteries of a process supposedly invisible, but in fact well
known to all the protagonists? It is no longer a case of negatively turning music –
the object of musicians – into a belief by arguing that it is a collective process
disguising a different, social, cause, but of understanding how musicians set up in
their midst a shared object that is as unstable as music, which must ever be created
anew. Conversely, musicians may perhaps teach sociologists how to focus on the
role of objects in general, whether in the real world or in their theories.
Music is a Theory of Mediation
In order to emphasise the importance of using mediation as a guide through the

social sciences, works of art and music, I have divided this book into two parts.
In the first part, I return to the Durkheimian model of belief, which I maintain
has remained the basis for the sociological perspective on cultural objects: the
point of mediation, which from the inception of sociology was at the heart of the
sociological interpretation of culture, is that it raises the question of the relationship
between the principles of collective action and the role of objects. The exemplary
case of sociological studies of art will then allow us to look closely at the ways in
which we can formulate the relationship between objects and the societies which
produce and welcome them. From a variety of angles, social interpretations of art
have attempted to restore all the different sorts of mediators – human, institutional,
material – which channel its relationship with its public (academies, patrons,
collectors, merchants, critics, the media, etc.). This restoration, whether it started
from a sociological critical perspective denouncing the aesthetic relationship
between a subject and an object, or from an art historical scholarly perspective
proceeding through an accumulation of mediators, ended up homing in on the
notion that actors collectively produced the art world. This restoration sheds new
light on sociological theories of the object: in their various ways, their theoretical
approaches, which themselves mediate the relationship between the individual
and the collective (professions, institutions, milieux, classes, fields, networks,
markets …), all try to move beyond a regressive dual symmetry which is unable
to include intermediaries in its analyses: this regression leads either to a pure
aesthetics where objects float around outside the social sphere or towards an
ethnological model, where art is merely the fetish of modern societies.
There was a way out of this impasse. Art historians were able to escape this
dualism: I will follow their lead in order to formulate a model of mediation giving
a mode of causality alternative to Durkheim’s model of belief. Art historians focus
on the complexity of mediators without turning them into puppets in the service
of an overarching cause, a means to an end or an external rationale. Their analyses
thus take into account the same mediations, proceeding from human beings and
institutions to the frames of perception and the material components, including
the most intricate details of the works and their production: this approach makes it
possible to bridge the deep divide between social analyses of the conditions of art
and aesthetic or semiotic analyses of the works themselves.
In the second part of this book, I start from an analysis of the reinterpretation
of Baroque music in order to explore the status of the intermediaries without
whom we are unable to hear music. There is no better way to do this than by
focusing on the interpretations of a three-century-old Baroque music, which from
the 1970s and 1980s was presented to us in two perfectly antithetical rival forms –
‘Classical’ and ‘historically informed’ – by interpreters, musicologists, critics and
music lovers, using the widest possible range of musical reference, ranging from
their musicological quarrel over its original means of expression (instruments,
pitch, numbers of performers, phrasing, voices and tempos) to their market rivalry
in the media, on the radio, in concert halls, festivals and recording catalogues.
Instead of pitting these musical means and media against each other, is there a
way to see how they rely on each other in order to create a new object: the modern
appreciation of an antique music?
The validity of the case I am making must be tested in the light of its capacity
to provide a convincing reassessment of several different fields. Following the
method I elaborated in the chapter on the reinterpretations of Baroque music,
Introduction 5
which looked at these interpretations in the light of a theory of mediation, I present

a series of case studies and ethnographical analyses, covering the various aspects
of musical reality, from instruments to teaching techniques, from performance to
recording, from great composers such as Bach to music lovers and audiences.
Although I discuss popular and contemporary musical forms, I have nevertheless
privileged Classical music for two very different reasons. The first of these reasons
arises from within my analysis, which relies on the historical dimension which
is central to Classical music. The second of these reasons is more strategic. In
my previous work on the sociology of music I looked at popular music, the disc
industry, and rock music (Hennion 1978, 1981, 1983b, 1989). Popular forms of
music are therefore not only at the origin of the arguments I develop here (music
as performance, bodily expression, its transmission through the media and identity
formation); indeed, these studies have led me to examine these issues in other
musical forms, and in particular to examine Classical music whose artistic status, as
well attracting accusations of elitism, easily veils its social significance. Although
more difficult to analyse, Classical music for this very reason has much to tell us
about the relationship between the social sciences and their object of analysis.
The variety of the sites of my analysis does not imply lack of focus. On the
contrary, this variety is necessary if one admits that the profusion of the mediators
of music is what makes it possible to restore its world. Considering the problem
which objects present the social sciences with, I wish to use the solutions that music
has devised in order to connect its performances to its ‘social context’, instead of
following the reverse procedure of pretending that the question has been solved,
and reading a supposedly given musical object in terms of an array of excessively
tidy disciplines. Music presents us with a good example of the opportunities
provided by this reversal of perspective. Even at the level of terminology, it
hardly mentions the subject and the object, and even less the artist. The ‘musician’
can just as easily be the composer, the interpreter or the music lover. Essence is
discussed less than performance, the work less than its versions, ‘being’ less than
playing, presence and interpretation. Rather than having music on one side and
the audience on the other, and servile third parties between them, music in fact
always appears in the middle, in a specific confrontation of an audience with its
interpreters, through its specific material mediators – instruments, scores, the stage
or sound systems.
Nothing justifies using these hybrid entities, which come together to make
music, as templates for something deeper and more permanent, treating them as
specific instances of a more general relationship between music as object and
musician as subject (which are only thus designated in text books on aesthetics).
These entities may not actually invalidate such dualistic thinking, but they
do at least displace and contextualise it, showing how the presentation of the
confrontations between music and musicians calls on different procedures each
time, modifying each of the terms present. It is mediation which allows us to
reconcile the two radically different senses acquired by the word ‘object’, which
is used to indicate either a principle of the profoundest reality, the Object (with
a capital O) or on the contrary its material remains, already moribund, that is,
objects (lower case). Dualist thought had evacuated from the one all the substance
of the others – allocating to aesthetics the praise of the Object and to sociology
the critique of the objects. Whereas in fact when musicians interpret what happens
among themselves and with their music, they speak now of the object of their
gathering (the music), now rather of their community, and in both cases they derive
from these situations a configuration which depends closely on the relationship
established between them through objects: the beauty of music or the identity of a
group may well sometimes be mysterious manifestations of this communal effort;
but they are in no way its causes.
The Work, the Group and the Mediators
‘I love Bach.’ This is a trite phrase, which individualises love to the highest
degree: a man loves music, which he identifies with the name of its creator. But
this is not the only form which musical extremes may take. In examples as diverse
as the trances of African tribes and the spontaneous trips of rockers we may find
a contradictory configuration, that of the group which music is able to infuse and
animate directly: ‘We want Stones! We want Stones! …’ scream the fans as they
await the arrival of their idols. How to characterise these extreme expressions of
the musical passion? The case of the enraptured music lover may be defined as the
intimate love of a man of taste for a work whose presence he perceives in the shape
of an object possessing the most delicately sculpted contours, which in their turn
fine-tune the subtle architecture of his intricately refined perception. Whereas it is
collective fusion that typifies the thrill of a crowd, galvanised into a group through
music pumping like the surge of an ocean wave and blasting gusts of ether, inhaled
then dispersed through the collective intoxication of the group.
Taking as the object of my study those extreme expressions which are love
shared by a couple and the frenzy of a non-differentiated crowd, I locate these
symmetrical avatars of passion with the actors, recognising their performative
nature. For these forms of passionate transport appear at first in the musical world
itself, relating the love of music either to the power of a transcendent object over
an ecstatic subject (following the aesthetic model copied directly from the visual
arts) or alternatively relating it to a sort of sociological reduction deliberately
sought by the group (following the ethnological model, which, far from sacralising
the objects, returns to the source, to the tribal performance which is transmitted in
the music) to the strange power which it is said to derive from its distant origins –
sacred, ritual and orgiastic. Apollo against Dionysos, music as aesthetic object
against music as channel for collective performance … But what if, instead of
reading them as eternal myths or turning them into social arguments, we were to
take these extreme figures not as our ‘resource’ but our ‘topic’,1 that is to say to
1
Using the opposition proposed by ethnomethodology, cf. Garfinkel (1967).
Introduction 7
read them as potential resources for musicians and their audiences, which they
collectively draw on in order to construct the hybrid constructs which allow them
to shuttle back and forth between the social and the musical? Might they thus be
able to restructure the whole edifice, founding it anew, now on the living truth of a
relationship developed among a gathering of human beings, now on the mysterious
beauty of a work which on the contrary is irreducibly other. This is how they are
able to move from day to day between music as first cause of their love and music
as polished effect of their activity. We shall see with what virtuosity they thus
mark out the frontiers of their world, becoming music lovers and sociologists in
turn, driven on the one hand to confirm their passion for and faith in music, and
decrying on the other the procedures and appetites which would lead it astray.
At the end of the book I shall return to this paradoxical dual foundation, which
maintains the division between an ideal music – the music, the music I love, the
inexpressible, absolute beauty which ravishes me – and the other, real, forms of
music, pretexts and channels for human, all-too-human relationships, forms of
music pervaded with an intermingling of relationships, habits and conventions,
which may in the end be reducible to little more than self-inflicted illusion or
commercial manipulation, snobbish elitism or technical triumph, blinding passion
or collective hypnosis. These dualist visions are not ‘ex’-plicative models, as seen
by an external observer, which might be straightforwardly rejected or adopted,
but ‘im’-plicative models that musicians mobilise in occasional and contradictory
array, in order to ‘set out their stall’ and ‘keep the world in its place’, to use
Becker’s terms (1982), when faced with the awkward conglomerate of people and
things that are the ingredients of music.
The Object, Mediation, the Social: Two Contrasting Models
Art historians came to an agreement over the problem of mediation, if not over
how to solve it, as the social historian of art M. Warnke freely admits:
No one now disputes that the arts have always functioned and developed within
a framework of interacting social forces, but it is not clear at what level we
should look for the crucial mediating factors that link art with the needs or
interests of society. (1993, p. xv)
What are the theories advanced in order to account for the process of mediation
between art and society? What is the status of objects in the social analysis of
art? The problem arises because their interpretations resort simultaneously to two
contradictory modes of engagement with reality, alternately explaining objects
through the social factors which compose them and then the social through the
objects which underpin it:
Collective representations … presuppose that consciousnesses act on and react

to one another; they are the result of these actions and reactions, which are
possible only through tangible intermediaries. These intermediaries, then, not
only reveal the mental state associated with them, they contribute to creating it.
Individual minds can meet and commune only on condition that they come out
of themselves; but they can do this only through movements … Once … these
movements have taken a form and a stereotypical configuration, they symbolise
the corresponding representations, but only because they have combined to form
them. (Durkheim 2001, pp. 175–6)
Durkheim, to whom we shall return in detail, usually expresses vigorously and

clearly the sociologist’s one-sided response to the problem of mediation. But here
he lapses into the same double-speak as everyone else, playing the double game
that we shall constantly encounter across the different disciplines of the study of
art, in the form of the two series of divergent associations which are activated in
order to interpret art without actually making it the source of its own interpretation:
‘What does art mediate?’/‘What is it that mediates art?’ The art historian replies to
these questions without having formulated them, using subtle models of mediation
which draw on two models of interpretation, one linear (or natural, external, ex-
plicative: what is it that mediates of art?), the other circular (cultural, internal, im-
plicative: what does art mediate?). But first of all we propose to proceed to a finer
definition of the models, starting from the analysis of cultural objects suggested
by Durkheim. The word ‘mediation’ is not chosen arbitrarily to designate this
oscillation: it appears systematically when we pass from one model to the other,
as much in the practice of the actors in constructing and justifying their world as
in the theories of the scholars.
Why the Term ‘Mediation’?
Let us establish the parameters of this cumbrous term. It indicates well enough a
site of questioning, taking as its problematic the articulation between these two
dual modes which we have cited. The attribution of causality is not a theoretical
operation decided by the sociologist: it is the constant practice of the actors, and the
sociologist’s task is to focus on these acts of attribution by the actors themselves.
These attributions relate the facts to something other than themselves (as the
word ‘ex’-planations suggests). ‘Something other’ which leads either towards the
external nature of a naturalised reality, or to the internalised cultural identity of the
group which creates representations of reality for itself. By calling mediation any
operation which displaces the causes of reality supplied by the actors themselves,
whether towards the linear model or towards the circular model, we turn the
confusion surrounding the word into less a question of semantic imprecision than
a means of expressing the dualism present at the heart of the work of questioning
the causes of reality.
Introduction 9
The awkward thing is that the term is an integral part of the problem that it
attempts to solve. It is too general. Thus it is compatible with thought obsessed
with the intermediary constructions of delegation, just as much as it is compatible
with the critical theory which sees nothing but betrayal in any form of mediation.
The term ‘mediation’ suits theories which reduce objects to the status of pretexts,
as it does those which emphasise their irreducible nature. For sociologists it has
most often taken on the first meaning, and, following Durkheim’s usage, to speak
of the mediation operated by an object, a person or an institution is to treat them
in advance as part of the social definition of the group whose instruments they are.
But these very ambiguities make the term ‘mediation’ useful. It operates a
theoretical promotion of the intermediary, by removing the prefix ‘inter-’ which
would make it a feature secondary to the realities between which it is located; by
adding the suffix ‘-tion’ of action which emphasises the primacy of the agency
of appearance over what appears. The intermediary lies between two worlds, in
order to facilitate their relation: it comes after what it links, the worlds in question
do not need it in order to exist, they obey their own laws. The intermediary’s
skills are tactical:2 Taking into account the constraints and laws pertaining to
various, heteroclite realities, the question is how to transport something from one
to the other, how to put them in touch with one another, and create intersections?
Mediation evokes a different order of relations. The worlds and their laws are not
given in advance. There are only strategic relations, which define at one and the
same time the terms of the relation and its modalities. Beyond a mediation there
appears not an autonomous world but another mediation. Their relations compose
a network whose unity is not wholly embraceable by anyone, yet this network can
produce conglomerates as vast as the intermediary’s whole world. Quite simply,
they are a heterogeneous series, increasingly tightly interwoven, polarised and
channelled into stable realities. They are not first-degree realities whose rules
an intermediary would merely have to discover in order to exploit them. In
this matter, from Foucault’s ‘genealogy’ (1963, 1966) to the ‘labelling theory’
of the interactionists (who study not madness or deviance, but those who label
others as mad or deviant (Becker 1963)), via the emphasis on pragmatics rather
than enunciation (Austin 1962, Todorov 1970, Recanati 1979), or the over-used
chiasmi of 1970s sociology (such as ‘the reality of production or the production of
reality’), my approach is in line with the increasing general tendency of the social
sciences to invert cause and effect: to study rather the construction of reality than
realities already constructed.
Another, more technical, advantage is that the work indicates the operation
rather than the operators; it does not commit us to making any separation in
principle between instruments, it allows us to navigate at will amongst people and
2
This is the position which M. de Certeau and L. Giard (1983) assign to the cultural
mediators that they have studied, while still emphasising their importance; moreover we
should note that de Certeau, in Arts de faire (1980), had magnificently revalued tactics, in
terms of the art of the dominated.
things, subjects and objects, instruments, systems, languages and institutions; in

music it allows us to restore the essential continuity of analysis between the pianist,
his keyboard, the solfège which encodes his technique, the score he deciphers,
the concert hall paying his fee or the recording providing his market; it draws
our attention to a long series of key figures, with complementary or rival roles –
players, teachers and theorists, musicologists, critics, producers, publishers, sound
engineers, concert impresarios, music shops and passionate music lovers; and
to a no less heteroclite list of intersecting material or institutional arrangements,
more or less materialised as things – instruments, scores and treatises, teaching
manuals, recordings, media, music lessons, stage sets, concert halls: in short, all
the different types of programme which present us with music, from concert to
radio, from school to the Internet.
Even if still rather too negatively, meditation can be first understood in this
sense, as a method allowing us to shift our perspective, taking it from a direct
scrutiny of objects to a focus on the median zone where the intermediaries of
art are at work. They form a screen between music and us, they prevent us from
falling by turns into internal analysis, which allocates too much competence to
the subject and too many properties to the object, or into external analysis, which
reduces this rich world too soon to the status of being ‘merely’ an arbitrary cloak
draping the group. The intermediaries move us away from the analytic study of
art itself (whether in order to glorify or to demolish it) towards a reinstatement
of the resources which compose it and ensure its duration, preventing us from
obstructing and deconstructing it at will, opening up the possibility of creating a
ripe and positive problematics of mediation, by locating it in its context, in situ.
The results obtained by art history (taken in its strictest, that is its most exclusive
and somewhat autocratic, sense, that of the history of the visual arts) will show
us mediation at work at the very core of the discipline. From a dualistic, non-
mediated opposition between aesthetically motivated history and social history,
the critical literature of art history has indeed managed to travel a long and
arduous path and arrive at a place where the world of art is peopled with a throng
of mediators, enabling swift and fertile traffic between approaches rooted in the
object and approaches based on the social. Can we formulate an explicit theory of
the progress achieved? The type of causality enrolled by art history is opposed to
the type habitually conscripted by the social sciences: we shall see whether music
is able to help us understand how this model of mediation is able to replace the
traditional sociological explanation, which is unable to overcome its need to assert
its authority over the ethnic objects that it studies.3
3
This approach is inspired by that of the sociology of science and technology, in
particular that practiced by the CSI, which deals with object much more awkward than the
object of art. Their neighbourly and intellectual sympathy has constantly helped to inform
my research (Callon and Latour 1982, Latour 1984, 1991, Callon (ed.) 1989, Akrich 1992).
Introduction 11
A Passion for Music: ‘Transcending the Alternatives of Unveiling

and Naturalisation’4
I have stated that, in order to analyse the relations between the artistic object and
the social, using the notion of mediation, the existing critical literature would be
as much an object of analysis as a resource. In order the better to understand this
argument in the case of music, we might take the example of anthropology: in a
very clear way it is torn between two major sets of tendencies, those which just
take ethnic music as their object, and attempt to analyse it, and those which on the
contrary seek to discover the true social determinants of the strange power that this
music seems to possess: in my eyes it is this critical discipline itself, anthropology,
which reproduces and strengthens the dualism which it would do better to analyse,
between music as mediator of the group and music as transcendent object. The
ethnomusicologist is either an ethnologist, and music no longer exists, or he
becomes a musicologist, and creates a musical object made to measure, adding
to the hoard of scales and instruments in his universal museum of music. There is
nothing that shows the need to make mediation itself the object of our reflexion
better than this great divide.
For an example of the first instance let us quote G. Rouget:
the word music will be used to signify any sonic event … that cannot be reduced
to language … and that displays a certain degree of rhythmic or melodic
organisation. Music will therefore be taken in its most empirical and broadest
sense. In other words, it will not be treated as an art but as a practice displaying
the greatest possible variety of aspects (1985, p. 63, my emphasis) … Music
has often been thought of as endowed with the mysterious power of triggering
possession … There is no truth whatsoever in this assumption … Music does
nothing more than socialise it, and enable it to attain its full development. (1985,
pp. 325–6)
What is given as blindingly obvious is always the most revealing sign: the
question of music as a form of art does not even occur to him; it is self-evident
that such objects have no importance beyond the arbitrary system of significance
that articulates them. As a good ethnologist, Rouget is so anxious to avoid any
hint of the autonomous, magical force which the natives attribute to music, that he
inverts the problematics of the social production of art – as we will see Durkheim
also do, as well as Blacking (2000) in the case of music – and proceeds to declare
that music is now no more than one of the conditions helping to form the social:
4
The expression is taken from Boltanski and Thévenot (1987, p. 290), the initial
version of On Justification (2006). This revised edition of the book, published in French
in 1991, distanced itself from this Bourdieusian terminology in order to emphasise the
positive acts of justification made by ordinary people on the basis of a plurality of worlds
(instead of ‘natures’).
This means that the role of music is much less to produce the trance than to
create conditions favourable to its onset, to regularise its form, and to ensure
that instead of being a merely individual, unpredictable, and uncontrollable
behavioral phenomenon, it becomes, on the contrary, predictable, controlled,
and at the service of the group. (1985, p. 320)
The second instance is illustrated by the extreme position of S. Arom (1985).

He argues for a radical separation between the objective and the social aspects
of music, in order to pay detailed attention to the former, taking great pains to
clarify his methodology. Following his declared intention to note only ‘pertinent
statements regarding musical practice elicited from the traditional musicians
themselves’ (p. 655), he describes in detail the formalities, the sessions, the tape
recorder, the procedures, the transcription. Inserted in the middle of the work we
see extraordinary photos of the Aka pygmies, wearing headphones, checking their
‘overdubs’.5 This is a spectacular illustration of Arom’s quasi-ethnomethodological
discipline, which makes manifest the profoundly interventionist nature of his
work. But he himself is entirely blind to this aspect: with all this gear, the pygmies
would have to be deaf if they didn’t ‘see’ the musical object! It is Arom himself
who turns music into a fixed, material object, and it is he who, reflecting it back to
them in this guise, transforms the native inhabitants into musicians.
Recent research has tended to accentuate the divide. On the one hand it has
given broader dimensions to the object and the subject of music, mobilising
aesthetics, musicology, musical theory, musical history and psychology, in
order to define ‘emotion and meaning in music’.6 Whereas, on the contrary, the
research undertaken by anthropologists and sociologists has made these objective
characteristics disappear increasingly radically behind the social forces which
drive them, following a line which runs with little interruption from Durkheim’s
concept, formulated in terms of a belief which brings the collective into existence,
to Bourdieu’s theory of the arbitrary, which transposes the Durkheimian argument
of the primitive group clutching its symbols onto the modern subject hooked by his
tastes. The price to pay for this transfer, for this continuity, is yet another denial,
whereby the modern subject, in affirming his freedom of judgement, disguises
the social mechanisms which preside over his election of objects. The sequence
of words ‘collective-belief-arbitrary-social difference’ is so powerful that it is
sufficient to underwrite the whole sociological option. And it is, as it were, a
lapsus linguae which will allow us to detect, sheltering behind this screen, the
everyday work of the sociologist who in his turn comes to repopulate the world of
music with intermediaries.
5
Overdubbing, studio technique where the individual musician plays only his own
score while listening to the other members of the group on his headphone.
6
Such is the title of one of the classics of this synthetic tradition, Emotion and
Meaning in Music (Meyer 1956).
Introduction 13
Merriam made this diagnosis as early as 1964, deploring the fact that music
should have forked into ‘two directions, the anthropological and the musicological’:
‘an overwhelming number of books, articles and monographs is devoted to studies
only of music, which is often treated as an object in itself without reference to the
cultural matrix out of which its produced’ (pp. vii–viii). This oscillation has been
extremely difficult to handle by the critical literature on music, this is why I have
managed to negotiate its analysis with the help of Durkheimian ethnology: it will
lead us to the gateway of music itself, which we may henceforth open – certain
that we shall discover the tension between music-as-object and music-as-relation,
and that this tension will lead us to mingle with a crowd of mediators (instruments,
scores, stages, media, composers, players, teachers, producers, critics and music
lovers …).
If all goes according to plan, it is their theory whose richly populated musical
pageant will lead the book to its conclusion.
Chapter 1
Lasting Things: Durkheim as a Founding
Father of the Sociology of Culture
Without symbols, moreover, social feelings could only have a precarious existence.
Those feelings are very strong while men are assembled and subject to mutual
influence, but they survive later, only in the form of memories that gradually fade if
left to themselves … But if the movements by which these feelings were expressed
are inscribed on lasting things, then they become lasting themselves.
Émile Durkheim, 2001, p. 176
The problems that the social sciences encounter when faced with art – and even
objects in general – have a founding precedent – in the model which Durkheim
created to account for the beliefs that native peoples have in their totems, and
the actual power that totems have over them. Rather than tackle the relationship
between society, object and mediator – that golden triangle of the literature on
artistic objects – directly, we will return to this source, for the sake of its clarity.
It will help us to grasp the issues at stake in this debate, before its developments
made it more complex: does the power of the totem come from the objects (via
linear causality), or from the group that elected them as objects (via circular
causality)? The circular model allows Durkheim to discredit the linear model that
native peoples uphold while respecting the importance it has for them. This is how
he interprets primitive religion (2001, pp. 170–71):
The main purpose of religion is not to provide a representation of the natural

world … religion is above all a system of notions through which individuals
represent the society to which they belong.1
Durkheim’s account of cultural mediation was seminal: since then, the two modes
of representation it opposes have always underpinned the ability of sociology to
demystify the causes that social agents appropriate.
1
To this, he adds: ‘The purpose (of “the totemic image”) is not to embody and evoke
a particular object, but to bear witness that a certain number of individuals share the same
moral life’ (2001, p. 177).
A ‘Well-Founded’ Delirium
Durkheim’s theory of emblems is a case in point: some cultural objects do not

draw their power from within themselves but from the collective they symbolise.
The native feels that an external force is acting upon him, independently of his
will, and that it has inescapable consequences but no clear source. It is entirely
abstract for him. He doesn’t know where it is coming from: he seeks its cause,
until, unable to find it, he names it: ‘The objective of the symbol merely expresses
this exteriority’ (2001, p. 176). This is inextricably linked to Durkheim’s decision
to position the issues raised by causal attribution and by representation squarely at
the centre of his model:
1. Native peoples grant a magical power to certain things.

2. Right-thinking modern people think it proper to pour scorn on native
peoples by showing that in reality these things do not have the powers they
attribute to them.
3. Durkheim stands up for native peoples and exposes the false rationalism
of modern minds by shifting our perspective on its causal attribution: the
‘delirium’ of primitive religion is ‘well founded’. Its power, which is real,
is not mistaken. However, its origin is. It lies not in the objects themselves
but in what they stand for: the social, the collective power of the group:
So it is not strictly speaking a delirium; for the ideas objectified in this way are
solidly grounded not in the material things onto which they are grafted but in the
nature of society. (2001, p. 173, my emphasis)
Durkheim’s analyses ground new systems of belief: that is, the representations made
by actors, which he takes seriously (rather than opting for a primary demystification
directly focused on the objects of belief: ‘their beliefs are deluded’). However, he
finds their explanation in another cause (opting for a secondary demystification:
‘they know not what they do’):
When the Australian is transported beyond himself … he is not prey to illusion.

This exaltation is real, and it really is the product of forces external and superior
to the individual. Of course, he is mistaken when he believes that this heightened
vitality is the product of a power that takes plant or animal form. But his error
lies only in taking literally the symbol that represents this being to men’s minds.
(2001, p. 170, my emphasis)
This is why Durkheim’s reference to Saussure is important: his interpretation

switches to a linguistic model. Instead of being what they are and the source of
their power, as native peoples think, cultural objects (totems, names, rites and
institutions) are symbols. They mediate an invisible power which is external
to individuals and which they need to visualise by giving it a material form in
Lasting Things: Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Sociology of Culture 17
emblems. Such is the theory of the flag, for which the soldier dies. Neither a
trivial scrap of cloth, nor the real object of the sacrifice, it materialises a powerful
idea that would nevertheless remain too abstract without this representation: his
country (cf. 2001: 172–4). All the variables of mediation are in place in the three
stages of this process: first, the cause of the power is attributed to the ‘thing itself’
by native peoples; then, this attribution is subjected to the rationalists’ external
demystification of the beliefs of others (‘in reality, there is no such power’); and
finally, the ethnologist stands up for native peoples (‘indeed, there is a force at
play’): however, his explanation shifts our perspective on its causal attribution
(‘… but it comes from elsewhere’).
Circles and Mirrors: Setting the Path for Critical Sociology
This point of view anticipates the charge levelled by the sociology of culture
against modern subjects: dealing with real but hidden social causes, Durkheim
underlines their reality while generously ignoring their concealment in totemic
images. In contrast, modern sociology focuses on this dissimulation. Instead
of showing that primitives are essentially right to believe in the power of inert
objects, it castigates its contemporaries for their staunch denial of the social nature
of the virtues which they attribute to this or that individual work – and to its
viewers. Modern sociology proceeds the other way around, approaching the issue
from the inside, rather than from the outside. Instead of showing that apparently
nonsensical types of behaviour towards arbitrary objects are in fact well founded,
as Durkheim did, they demonstrate that behaviour which appears well founded by
the nature of our objects is actually arbitrary. Ethnology adds grist to the narrative
of modern sociology by presenting it with a radical and far-fetched scenario: a
society in which the modern ethnologist may casually ignore the intrinsic value
that its members attribute to objects – it is no coincidence if Durkheim did not
differentiate clearly between sociology and ethnology. However different the tone
in which they speak, when critical sociologists show how much we conceal the
social causes that determine our choices, opinions and tastes behind mystifying
assertions of individual freedom, they perform the same operation as ethnologists
do regarding natives’ totems: they demystify the linear belief modern subjects
have in their objects, and relate it to the circularity of the group.
The ‘subject’ of artistic production and its product is not the artist but the
whole set of agents who are involved in art … the producers of works regarded
as artistic (great and small, famous – i.e. ‘celebrated’ – or unknown) critics,
collectors, go-betweens, curators, art historians, and so on. So we’ve come
full circle. And we are caught inside.2 Durkheim laid the foundations for the
2
Bourdieu (1993b, p. 148, my emphasis) constantly uses the image of the circle when
speaking of delegation and representation (whether by human beings or within things):
‘It is because the representative exists, because he represents (symbolic action) that the
sociological discourses of today, which apply his ethnological hypotheses to

the modern world. All these discourses had to do was turn the representation
displaced onto cultural objects into forms of social repression performed by
the actors on themselves and revealed by the sociologist,3 or else into a mirror
in whose blind spot the meaning of the objects is lost,4 whereas ethnological
positivism would simply let the observer unproblematically interpret these
representations. Sociologistic discourse is an ethnological discourse with denial
in addition! Ethnology underlies sociology’s fraught relationship with modern
objects, which it never knows whether to accept or destroy (religion, the law,
art, science, etc.): reassured by the ‘simplicity’ of primitive societies,5 ethnology
avoided awkwardly composite realities that were at once natural and social
and teeming with objects that resisted interpretation, sparing the conscience
of observers by keeping them at a good remove from the society under their
lens. Durkheim made this watertight separation between social and natural
objects the very principle of the sacred. This distinction was adopted by those
modern sociologistic discourses which consider all objects to be symbols. This
innovation marked a regressive return to precisely that Durkheimian ethnologism
which sociology had finally relinquished in order to give due consideration to
objects and work, without turning them into totems and rites: these objects
having resisted sociologistic interpretations which reduced them to tools of
social differentiation, all the intermediary sociological concepts, professions,
organisations and institutions came to interpose their realistic screens in front of
these interpretations.
group that is represented and symbolised exists and that in return it gives existence to its
representative as representative of a group … This sort of original circle of representation
has been concealed’ (1991, p. 204).
3
This scientistic take on the work of critical analysis is closely associated with
Bourdieu’s search for ‘a comprehensive balance-sheet of symbolic profits’ (1990b, p. 120).
Exposing the beliefs of actors gives this brand of sociology its scientific self-identity, as
the task that Bourdieu allocates to the social history of art clearly demonstrates: ‘It means
describing the economic and social conditions of the constitution of an artistic field capable
of underpinning belief in the quasi-godlike powers attributed to the modern artist’ (1993b,
p. 148).
4
This post-modern version of sociology is just as critical: consumption is ‘a mirror
in which it (society) takes supreme delight in itself’ (Baudrillard 1998, p. 194) or ‘But here
we are once again … caught in the trap of the Object and its apparent plenitude. Now, we
know that the Object is nothing (p. 196). Torn between Marxist materialism and semiotic
post-modernism, Baudrillard hesitated between a theory of matter and a theory of signs: far
from turning away from an unmediated representation of Durkheim’s two ‘natures’ – the
nature of things and the nature of society – he made them overlap, unlike Durkheim who
tried to keep them separate.
5
‘Primitive civilizations, then, are privileged cases because they are simple cases …
their very crudeness makes them instructive’ (Durkheim 2001, pp. 8 and 10). We do not
speak like that anymore!
Once again, we are confronted with the opposition we sought to define

between the sociological circularity of a group seeking to represent itself and the
natural face to face between people and things. This gives us a measure of just how
generic this opposition is. Faced with the power of the totem – that is, nowadays,
the media, consumer goods or works of art – the ‘native’ – i.e. the televiewer,
homo communicans, the consumer, the art lover – attributes to the object (and
to himself, as subject) what he feels to be its effects on him (whether to submit
to or reject them): the model he adopts is linear, indeed natural, physical. The
rationalists’ feeble demystification of the power of the object relies on the same
causal model, except that they deny that this power exists. Declaring this power a
simple illusion of magic, they approach the issue negatively and from the outside.
In contrast, naturalists position themselves within the space of belief, examining
this power on its own terms while scientifically exploring a variety of points of
application and origin, and analysing the variables which modify its impact. This
is a common approach in audience research, the sociology of tastes and cultural
practices, and marketing practices: deployed as soon as one wishes to codify the
subject/object relationship, it is based on the same model as the horoscope (‘tell
me where you are from, I’ll tell you who you love’ – and vice versa). In short,
the powerful demystification of the power of the object by ethnology – and later
by its sociologist alter-ego – brings the causal model of nature back to its ‘true’,
social, nature. Rather than examining the confrontation between objects, which
possess their own intrinsic properties and subjects with their own individual skills,
it focuses on the circle of human beings who would be atomised in their natural
state but are transmuted into a collective when they represent their own group to
themselves through their mediators.
Yet it is easy to understand how compelling such a model can be for thinking
about cultural objects, sociology or the social history of art. Insofar as it returns art
to a universe of signs, its explanatory principle is as general as these disciplines
could hope for. And we can well imagine the forms that the resistance to the
sociological project would take: they would all hinge on a refusal to assimilate
art to a body of signs, by emphasising the question of value, the opacity of its
materials, and the irreducibility of works to social interpretations which are largely
indifferent to them. By actively ignoring the specificity of the art object, the
sociologistic onslaught invited the two responses that it received: the reassertion
of aesthetic value on the one hand, and the infinite array of mediations that are
specific to art, on the other. This also helps us to understand why theories require
founding fathers: paying homage to the current value of their interpretations is not
what is at stake, insofar as they are not so much accepted or rejected, as they are
overlaid by the complex developments they gave rise to. The merit of great figures
who, like Durkheim or Weber, have founded new disciplines, lies not so much in
their originality, as in their capacity to constitute a point of origin by explicitly
formulating a basic hypothesis – such as the hypothesis behind the radical
sociologistic position in this case. To neglect them is to run the risk of returning
in fits and starts to one of their generic tenets, depending on one’s circumstances
and needs. Insofar as they allow us to name available a priori explanations, they
are themselves emblematic of thought rather than the improbable precursors of
future theories.
The emblematic function of the theory of emblems is particularly clear:
Durkheim’s neat formulation of this theory allowed us to single out precisely one
type of explanation (the notion that culture represents a group through mediators
which materialise its invisible reality, and constitutes an artificial universe which
is ‘superimposed’ on the material universe (2001, p. 174)), which in turn made it
possible for him to recognise its future versions. Beyond the particular direction in
which he would take this theory (that is, beyond his rationalism, which considers
society to be just as much of a material cause as gravity is in physics) Durkheim
made the sociologist argument visible, just as the emblem makes society visible. Of
course, if the ‘symbolic efficiency’ of his explanation derives from its extremity, it
also underpins its slow deterioration: as each one of its simplifications became the
focus of theoretical analysis, its twin sociological and ethnological inheritors would
grapple anew with complex problems, and the beautiful consensus suggested by
the image of an army united by its flag would be lost.
A Binary, Instrumental and Passive Model of Mediation
Durkheim’s theory can be divided into three main hypotheses:
• Firstly, profane and sacred realities are distinct and mutually exclusive.
Durkheim’s theory of mediation does not have a general but a narrow
remit: only some objects have this cultural charge, and it is this charge
which designates them as such. Rituals and taboos clearly identify them
and set them apart in the eyes of the group, which emphasises the difference
between the sacred and the profane and erects barriers between them.
• Then comes a second simple operation: the divide between the profane
and the sacred is brought to bear on another divide between real objects
pertaining to an everyday, familial, feminine world where things are
what they are, and cultural objects belonging to a represented, political,
masculine world where things stand in the place of other things. Displaying
the difference between what has to do with the nature of things and what
relates to the artificial universe of signs which the group has constructed,
rituals and taboos define the space of the artificial world where the social is
represented. Mediation is the instrument of this signification.
• Finally, there is a third operation: once cultural objects have been promoted
to signifier status, their signified becomes the group – i.e. the power of the
collective over the individual. Simultaneously constraining and salutary,
this power is genuine, invisible and external to consciousness but its
material representation in an external object helps us to visualise it, indeed
to ‘realise’ it in both senses of the term. Instrumental and restricted in
scope, cultural mediation is thus also external and passive in relation to

the social reality which it allows us to interpret – and which it reciprocally
allows the sociologist to interpret.
The main point of this demonstration lies in the exclusive character of the divide
which separates the sacred and the profane (in terms of the reality to be explained)
or – and it comes down to the same thing – between what pertains to the social
and what does not (in terms of the explanation). This mutual exclusion thus sends
us back to:
• The observed facts (as posited before Durkheim’s theory): the active
separation which ‘primitives’ themselves make between the sacred
and the profane, and all the guarantees which they provide against their
mutual contamination.
• And, in the other direction, towards Durkheim’s theoretical positions
themselves: they turn the social into a positive reality which is endowed with
its own area of pertinence and which can and must be analysed separately
but in conjunction with physical, biological, or psychological realities. The
social is a cause which can be evaluated in terms of its effects, so long as
its area of application has been correctly singled out – something which
primitives did very well when they cautiously manipulated the sacred.
Durkheim finds an echo of this idea in the analyses of B. Malinowski
(1922): the Trobriand people know very well how to differentiate between
economic, utilitarian exchanges – which are reciprocal, linear and natural –
and the dramatic, collective, and circular cultural exchanges pertaining to
the Kula. For them too, one is either dealing with nature or with culture –
that is with the mediated representation of the social in material objects.
The fact that Durkheim privileges social reality means that the status of the other
elements present in his theory of culture as mediation of the collective is either
inferior or instrumental. The very necessity of using cultural mediators in order
to achieve representation ends up becoming secondary: this is merely a technical
aspect deriving from the invisible character of a social reality which acts on
individuals without them knowing where it comes from, either within them or in
the natural world, and which they therefore tend to represent through symbolical
objects in order to give it a material reality. Durkheim always formulates his theory
this way, as a correspondence between symbolic objects and a single signified: the
social – which is indeed at odds with a linguistic model – as if he did not realise
how radically removed it is from a structural model. This is all the attention his
theory pays to the creation of a space of representation. The illusion which induces
the group to locate the origin of the power they feel in the object that represents it
rather than in the group itself has no status: it is the ‘natural’ confusion of the sign
for the thing it represents. Durkheim does not think it needs to be explained by a
theory. In other words, he is only at odds with rationalism when it throws the baby
out with the bathwater: that is, when it ignores the power of the collective together
with the talismans which give it presence. He is only interested in representations
insofar as they give him access to the represented reality: i.e. the collective, which
he endows with a reality as potent as if it were material. The representations
dissolve once they have been explained sufficiently to unveil the true cause which
lies behind the apparent causes indigenous people believe in.
However, to use Durkheim’s own words, the sociologist has no reason to
make the same error as the native: if the power derives from the social rather than
from its representation, that is to say if its active principle lies in the group rather
than in the sign, this means that representation is a passive, neutral and arbitrary
operation which ‘merely’ allows the group to signify itself to itself – it does
this by convention. Hence Durkheim’s reference to Saussure and his invocation
of arbitrariness, which is the key concept of this operation in sociology as in
linguistics: thanks to them, Durkheim imports the unbridgeable divide that lies
between the signified and the signifier into the social realm. This allows him,
first of all, to distinguish between what pertains to the social (and demands the
artifice of representation) and what concerns the physical, the biological or the
psychological. Secondly, it allows him to differentiate between the real cause –
the social – and the ritual representation which is only the apparent cause, while
articulating them together according to the model of the conventional and arbitrary
relationship of the signified and the signifier.
A More Active Form of Mediation?
In other words, there is a mediation, but this mediation is narrow in scope (it only
applies to certain objects: sacred objects), instrumental (it hangs on the invisible
character of the power of the collective), conventional (the actual content of
symbols is arbitrary and its only function is as a vehicle for signification) and
passive (its real cause is the social, and the symbol is merely a visual substitute for
it). Yet, behind the orthodoxy of his central argument, Durkheim sometimes allows
us a glimpse of the ambiguities underlying the theory of emblems. In most cases,
he is coherent: in particular, the first outlines of his theory are very congruent
with his ubiquitous understanding of the social as an objective, determining reality
which is simultaneously distinct from other realities and is like them governed
by laws which science can and must uncover. However, when it comes to the
neutral, or passive, character of mediation, he opens the door to a different theory
by insisting several times on its active character. Obviously, this was neither a
man to sing the beauty of primitive art, nor to allow himself to be led astray by the
opacity of practices and symbols, the disturbing fervour displayed by onlookers
during rites, or the dark shadow cast by accusations of witchcraft. In short, it was
not his style to endow ritual activities with the depth which strikes anthropologists
who are less keen on the reductive rigour of scientific endeavours. In the most
diluted sense, the active character of mediation is limited to an acknowledgement
that representation has its own efficiency, by allowing the group to ‘actualise’
its reality and by ‘reactivating’ the awareness that each member of the group has
of it. Although more active, this conception of mediation remains instrumental:
mediation ‘activates’ something which, therefore, comes first. The very beauty of
representations can be understood as an integral part of mediation, since it adds
value to their efficiency and represents the tribute the virtual group pays to the
constituted group: rich and ornate symbols are all the more effective for exhibiting
the fact that they are invested with the group’s appreciation and suggesting that
they can provoke its gratitude. However, at this point, it is a short step from
attributing a primary, founding power not to the sign itself, as native peoples do,
but to signification: rather than simply being the cause of that power, the social
thus becomes its effect: ‘The intermediaries … not only reveal the mental state to
which they are associated, they contribute to creating it.’
This reciprocity was already implicit in the word ‘emblem’ or in the image
of the flag: although they may well represent us, what they do, mostly, is sweep
us off our feet. Their materiality does not merely serve as a medium on which
another reality can inscribe itself, through the wholly intellectual process which
pairs them off: they make this reality actual by allowing an action which could not
have existed without them. The cultural sign which only exists because it names
the social also brings what it names into existence, which then forces us to change
our theory of representation, moving from a ‘constative’ model inspired from the
physical sciences, where reality acts on its own and is independent of the signs
used to name it, to a ‘performative’ model (Austin 1962), where representation
produces what it represents.6 In other words, it is now the social that is virtual, and
mediation that is real!
Durkheim leaves us there. However ambivalent the lines just quoted, as far as
he is concerned, the cause of the power – or constraint – emanating from cultural
objects is a settled matter: it ‘can clearly derive only’ from society, as he says
(2001, p. 140). But what happens when one lets go of the positivist assumptions
underlying this given, fixed, cause, which is external to the actors, and can be
treated as a ‘thing’, in order to ask how we cause our causes to come into being?
Symbolic Efficiency
Where does the power of the totem come from? Native peoples and first- and
second-degree rationalists have by turn attributed it to cultural objects themselves,
to the gullibility of the deceived collective assembly, to the self-realising effect of
belief, or even – if one follows through the implications of some shifts of meaning
in their writings, as we did with Durkheim – to the efficiency of representation
itself. This progression compels us to revisit this question, if one refuses to close
6
A. Danto (1981) will use the very same terms with reference to art, when confronted
to the ‘action’ of instruments of representation over representation itself; cf. infra, p. 162.
the debate with Durkheim’s society-as-thing model. In other words, if there is no

doubt that, for him, indigenous people take society for objects – the totems – does
this allow us to take society ‘as a thing’? What possible types of relationship are
there between a society and its representations – are they reciprocal or univocal?
Are they abstracted by the observer or put into practice by native peoples?
Scientific debates relocate the theory of the mediation of the actors’ reality in the
world of the social sciences. In the process, noblesse oblige, the fear elicited by the
power of totems has morphed into a discussion of ‘symbolic efficiency’.7
Durkheim does not so much resolve as cancel the debate on the performative
character of representations: the distinct roles of the actors and the sociologist
unambiguously settle the object/society relationship in opposite ways, benefiting
now the former, now the latter. In the field, indigenous people see objects act
when it is society that is acting through them. In contrast, the sociologist starts by
socialising objects (objects = society). However, his interpretation then objectivises
society: when they gather together to practise their rites, using any number of
mediators, indigenous people feel effects without seeing their invisible cause,
which totems ‘only’ represent. The scholar, in contrast, singles out this cause and
treats it like an object (society = object). Having determined the real cause of
these effects, he no longer needs mediators: they are merely the byproducts of
his analysis. A characteristic series of modifiers (‘only’) squares the circle:8 the
tangible objects of native peoples are ‘only’ mediators – which are themselves
‘only’ the talismans of society, which is itself the real scientific object. The
displacement of causes to which the debate on symbolic efficiency leads forms a
nice square, one side of which is left open (cf. Figure 1.1): Durkheim himself does
not sketch this square, since he has already determined the cause: society, which
merely ‘superimposes’ (the word is his) its mechanical but invisible power onto
the natural forces which weigh down on individuals. Durkheim empties the world
of its objects to fill it in a mutually exclusive manner either with signs (culture) or
with things (nature), making his theory the least mediating of mediation theories:
what he dramatises, twice and from two opposite directions, is the existence of
an exclusive divide between the linear and the circular models. First, he presents
this divide in the social reality he wishes to explain, by locating the power of
totems in the power of the collective (linear model > circular model); but then, the
explanatory model which he adopts attributes a positive cause that is as tangible
7
Boltanski (2012, ch. 12.3, pp. 138ff.) traces the history of this suspenseful debate
from Mauss’ The Gift and its critique by Lévi-Strauss in the Introduction he wrote for
it when it was reprinted in 1950, to Bourdieu in The Logic of Practice (1990) and his
own framing of the issue. This is the founding debate of the social sciences: starting from
objects and representation, it raises the questions of belief and value, and leads to the issue
of critique, as well as opening up the theoretical necessity – according to Boltanski – of
defining the competence which the sociologist leaves to the actors.
8
This turn of phrase is characteristic of demystifications: it replaces the appearance
of reality with its true nature.
as if it were material to the power of the collective, and treats it – to paraphrase

him – ‘as a thing’ (circular model > linear model).
1) Linear belief of native peoples

Individuals Objects
2) Rationalist demystification of this belief
Individuals // Objects
3) Introducing mediation
Individuals Objects
Mediators
4) Interpreting the mediation
Individuals Objects
Society Mediators
Figure 1.1 The square of belief
Durkheim’s model is misleadingly enlightening, since it solves the problems of

mediation by turning the social into a natural cause. Although the verbal paradox
sounds striking, this is a weak theory of mediation: we do not know whether the
group creates it or whether it constitutes the group. We are confronted with a
logical knot which is tied so tightly that it is ordinarily invisible, allowing the
theory of emblems to hold together despite its ambivalence. Otherwise – and this
is how Durkheim is usually read – society constitutes the primary reality, and
representation merely signifies it, or possibly activates it. This hypothesis is clear,
and it is congruent with his linguistic model of culture: society is signified in
objects. But if that is the case, it remains unclear why so much wealth and energy
needs to surround the deployment of cultural objects in order to ensure their much-
touted symbolic efficiency. Why go to such lengths if there is no more at stake,
for individuals, than naming the power of the group and acknowledging it, since
this power exerts itself anyway, independently from the work of representation?
The status of this operation, which initially seemed clear, becomes increasingly
confusing, hovering as it does between the native peoples who perform it and the
sociologist who interprets it. On the one hand, according to Durkheim, cultural
mediation is a challenge to name a cause – society – which is so difficult to identify
that it involves a purely intellectual quest for understanding for the natives. But
on the other hand, this operation fails precisely at the level of understanding:
indigenous people get it all right when they give shape to the sacred – this is an
exercise in self-sociology – except when they name the cause which they identify:
they mistake signs for the society which they represent.
Yet, Durkheim also opens up another path with the contradictory lines quoted
above, where representation is what comes first, creating the collective, which was
nothing before it was mediated. This better explains why rituals, cults, institutions,
prohibitions, ceremonies and mythical narratives carry such weight: it is now
possible to give serious consideration to the regulated circulation of objects in the
Kula, as well as to the potlatch, shamanic practices, or the change in a person’s
being that initiations produce. Indeed, it is now possible to accept that people have
a well-founded fear of the spirits that haunt their consciousness: these rites, these
prohibitions, this consciousness turn them into the sons of their ancestors – they
belong to a lineage. Understood in this light, culture is no longer a matter of signs
which moreover have mistaken their signifieds, but of performative acts which
allow the collective power to assert itself over individuals and natural forces,
remodelling the bodies and souls of its members, and lead them into the presence
of the world. It now seems less surprising that this should entail so much sweat,
blood, time and creativity. However, we have now lost the simple cause which
made the model so clear. This society, this power of the collective, what does it
become if it is also at the same time the effect of what it causes to come into being?
This takes us back to the oscillation between the linearity of external causes
and the circularity of internal causes: however, this to and fro is not so much
characteristic of indigenous people as it is of the theories they inspire. Durkheim
keeps the two antipodal moments in his analysis sealed off from each other: that
is, what the actors believe (mediation is promoted by and changes those linear
beliefs in a circular representation), and what the sociologist theorises (this
circular mediation is downgraded and makes way for the objective cause behind
it: society). He erects the same barrier twice: firstly, between the social and the
natural; and secondly, between the actors and the sociologist. Characteristically,
reopening the question of mediation will involve probing the two dividing lines
Durkheim creates, isolating the social by treating it like an objective reality, and
segregating the scholar from the actors.
Anthropology: Moving from Cause to Mediation
Anthropologists have an edge over sociologists when it comes to the problem

of accounting for objects in a social interpretation, insofar as they come from
the outside to confront a global society, which they have the right, and indeed
the duty, to formulate with all its objects. However, what is an imperative for
an anthropologist is a proscription for the sociologist, who is located within the
fragmented, specialised society he works on, where the social is already constructed
as one register among others. His attempts to elaborate a social analysis of questions
outside his field are seen to represent one form of disciplinary imperialism among
others. The debate on cultural mediation and the need to go through objects seem
less charged for anthropologists than sociologists: it is as though they can work on
these questions more serenely.
In the process, the field of application of the interpretation, which initially

was confined to sacred objects, has widened to encompass everything in a
culture,9 through the English use of this notion. This severely distorts the theory
of representation. For Durkheim, cultural objects are limited: their watertight
separation from natural objects is central to his model. They materialise
something: this is one of their primary functions – the rites, myths and prohibitions
surrounding totems are more akin to strategies for their protection than objects
themselves. They form a system of signs where each one represents all others,
as well as the whole of society, through the mana which they all incarnate, as
Mauss put it so masterfully: ‘The notion of mana … encompasses all the people
and all the things that intervene in all the rites. Mana is properly speaking what
gives their magical, religious, and even social value to things and people.’10 No
longer strictly associated with the sacred, ‘culture’ now rather indiscriminately
encompassed the relationships between society and nature themselves through its
great work of mediation.
This first step away from Durkheim’s restrictive cultural objects leads to
two different paths. If one can no longer accept the existence of two – natural
and cultural – worlds which are superimposed over each other and completely
separate, explanations begin to diverge, opting either for the notion that
‘everything is culture’ or for the idea that ‘everything is nature’. Faced with this
question, anthropologists are as nimble at juggling with objects, cultures, and
types of causality as sociologists. In particular, in common with sociologists, their
characterisation of mediation is either more active, productive and internal, or
more passive, instrumental and external. To the materialism of the functionalists
(‘Culture is an apparatus for the satisfaction of the elementary needs of the human
organism’),11 for example, they oppose the idealism of Lévi-Strauss, who on the
9
Lévi-Strauss (1958, p. 389) quotes the very wide, foundational, and now classic
definition which E.B. Tylor gave of culture in 1871: ‘that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired
by man as a member of society’ (p. 1). One would be hard pressed to see what it does not
encompass.
10
Mauss (1950, repr. 1985, p. 102) takes a surprising stand, in the sense that, long
before this became a concern, and very much unlike his positivist entourage, he showed
a very modern respect for the language of the actors themselves. He positioned himself at
the junction between this language (the mana) and an interpretation which considered the
issue from outside. This junction would be inconceivable for those who had a generalising
explanation. This was the case of Lévi-Strauss, whose well-known introduction to Mauss
straightforwardly stated that the founder of French anthropology had misunderstood the
hau, a notion which was to the gift what mana was to magic: ‘Are we not dealing with a
mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous
people?’ (1987; 2001, p. 47).
11
Malinowski (1937, p. 136). Lévi-Strauss later took delight in emphasising the
naivety of this stance’s confusion of the general and the banal: ‘Why then bother going
to distant places?’ (1963, p. 13). Cultural ecology takes this tendency to an extreme by
contrary turns mediation into an empty matrix to be filled by every observed

reality, whether these realities are natural (classes of plants, animals, etc.), social
(systems of kinship) or cultural (myths). In the functionalist scenario, the very
possibility of mediation is obliterated by the maximisation of linearity; in contrast,
Lévi-Strauss understands ‘everything is culture’ to mean ‘everything is mediation’,
cancelling the problem of the relationship between society, nature and culture with
a generic term which governs all three of them: the mind itself, ready to act on
any occurrence: ‘Both language and culture are the products of an activity which
is basically similar … the human mind’ (1963, p. 71). There would be several
other, often divergent, answers to the problem posed by the social, beyond the
two symmetrical solutions we have just mentioned – i.e. the functionalist notion
that society is entirely natural (a view which Durkheim would have rejected) and
the structuralist contention that society is not so much a thing as the outcome of
an operation involving representation and classification. In particular, sociologist
criticism would argue that the social is the hidden face of the classification
of things and men, while another solution lay in reallocating the social to the
actors, as what is at stake in interaction, or as what is socially constructed. But
for all their differences, these all departed increasingly from the notion of ‘social
facts as things’ (1982, p. 50) which Durkheim believed to be methodologically
self-evident.
The Status of Objects
Let us examine in more detail how the most characteristic of these interpretations
of the social understand objects and their mediation:
• For Durkheim, mediation is an instrument at the service of socialisation:

the objects selected for this operation are transformed into signs and are
nothing in themselves.
• For functionalists, or for cultural ecologists (who do not naturalise the
social indirectly and methodically, like Durkheim, but directly, as though
it were an object) mediations are no longer signs, but the instruments of
nature, which is itself the invisible principle behind the operation of the
subordinated social. The instinct of self-preservation thus becomes a deep
natural law regulating superficial social facts, leading the social toward a
biological, systemic or evolutionist definition.
• Structuralism superseded both the direct natural explanation of the social
and its methodological naturalisation: considering the representations of
the social and the natural to be two byproducts of a single prior classifying
attempting to deduce from geographical conditions all the conditions on which existence
depends and all the different forms of organisation and representation (cf. Ross 1976,
Hames and Vickers 1983); Descola (1989) presents and evaluates their model.
principle, it locates representation in objects, as well as in institutions, rites

or myths. Understood as an operation of the human mind, mediation itself –
as a structure – becomes the causal principle.
• Finally, mediation can be promoted to an ultimate analytical principle
the other way around: whereas structuralism operates from the outside,
detached from any real actions or institutions, as an abstract, generic
matrix independent from the contents which it classifies, it can proceed by
refocusing all causal operations onto the actors. Symbolic interactionism,
ethnomethodology and empirical ethnological research on the contemporary
world all share this desire to re-allocate the principle of their actions to
the actors themselves. This desire is a deep underlying drive in the social
sciences, which have forsaken both the positivist attribution of an external
cause to the actors and the negativist critique of internal causes which they
attribute to themselves. In the process, objects and mediations also become
more or less endowed with resistance, specificity or opacity, depending on
the tendency.
The terms of this discussion are evolving: moving away from the status of the
social itself, they are zooming in on the explanatory principles of the social
sciences. Social scientists are torn between focusing on intermediary causes
(society, the group, representation, etc.), which, depending on authors and
currents of thought, tend either towards the realism of observed facts, or towards
giving a theoretical account of a global process. The former hanker after linear
explanations: for them, social facts are in front of us, ready to be observed.
The latter are tempted by circular accounts: the social is that curious reality
which is its own cause. Every intermediary reality – the identity of a group, the
mimetic character of behaviours, the internalisation of norms – is marked by this
tension, which is at the heart of sociology. Sociologists are forever redirecting
these factors, either by re-attributing them to the actors, in order to conclude the
analysis on their capacity for producing the causes which rule them, or on the
contrary by distancing themselves in order to reassign this explanatory power to
themselves, theorising it and relating it to a higher principle.
It is now easier to see how convenient Durkheim’s reduction of this problem
was. On the one hand, there are human beings who are enacted by causes which
pre-exist them, and are blind and caught up in the circularity of the collective,
for the very reason that they cannot see it there in front of them, blinded as they
are by their linear model. On the other, the social sciences stand on the outside to
reveal the hidden laws governing the behaviour of actors, through the production
of abstract causes, which, although invisible, are as real as those which account
for natural phenomena in the physical sciences. In other words, neither the actors
nor the scholars really establish the causes for the positivist Durkheim: through
a double linear process, the former are merely subjected to them while the latter
only observe them. Mediation is stretched so thin between them that it is minimal:
on the side of the actors, it is a deceitful appearance; on the side of the sociologist,
it is the instrument which leads him to the real cause. This moribund version of
mediation only begins to come to life when – carried away by his argument – the
sociologist makes a slip of the tongue, which suddenly endows it with a more
creative role: in a last flash of guilt, his field notes reveal the opacity and the
density of processes of representation which his later synthetic works would
present as merely the passive intermediaries of a power already there, endured
and observed.12
Between Structure and Actors …
Durkheim leaves us with an unmediated mediation. The problems which he fails

to attend to despite his very clear language point to the outline of the theoretical
conflicts which would follow in his wake: what is the role of the mediators: are
they passive signs or performative producers? What is the definition of the social:
is it a subset of a larger reality or is it a principle which invests social representation
in the totality of the natural world? Where does the observer stand? Rather than
fading away, ambiguities have evolved into impassable obstacles which are all the
more difficult to level out for combining general presuppositions on the nature of
scientific explanations with the ‘tricks of the trade’ (to quote Becker) in fieldwork
research – that is to say, everything that is left more or less undebated. At the
risk of being heavy-handed, but for the sake of clarity, the positions which we
have presented as torn between various causalities and causes may be displayed
in a circle, in order to show the treatment which their social interpretation gives
to objects.
Less mechanical than the binary opposition of circular and linear models
we started with, the figure of the circle helps to visualise a chain of antithetical
pairs which are interlocking even as they are offset from each other (circular/
linear causality, natural/social causes, global/local causes): it explains a number of
unexpected connections.13 Above all, this diagram reveals an important slippage
in the role that actors play. Actors become increasingly active when one moves
from the right-hand side, where structuralism or critical theory consider that there
12
As has often been noted, the contrast is strongest in the work of Malinowski, who
is at once one of anthropology’s best ethnographers (cf. for example (1922)), and its most
reductive theoretician in A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (1944).
13
For instance, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Durkheim’s sociologic discourse
agree with the exteriority and the generality of scientific explanations, and refuse to allow
the social to dissolve in any way into the natural. However, Lévi-Strauss recaptures the
actors’ linear causes within the frame of a general circularity, whereas Durkheim understood
society in terms of the linearity of a general cause and considered the causality of actors to
be marked by a deficient circularity. At another level, antithetical currents of thought, such
as culturalism and naturalism, are drawn close by their common empiricism and preference
for partial causes.
is a global causality which is external to the actors, to the left-hand side, where
currents of thought which are close to the actors themselves are located, granting
them the power to produce their world themselves, giving increasing weight and
specificity to the operations involved in its production. The opacity of things and
the new active role which actors are acknowledged to play, on the left-hand side,
are at odds with, and offer some resistance to, the transparency of signs and the
invisible effect of the system inherited from structuralism on the right-hand side
of the diagram: the circular layout of these positions helps us to highlight what
interests us – i.e. their treatment of objects and the active or passive role which
they assign to mediation.
linear causality
natural cause social cause

diffusionism functionalism
cultural ecologism sociologism
culturalism structuralism
interactionism critical theory

local causality global causality
circular causality
Figure 1.2 The circle of causalities
We are at the cross-roads of anthropology and sociology: from this point

onwards, their paths diverge.
If the opacity of things has the upper hand over their interpretation, the
accumulated mediations mask the cause, whether natural or social, which they
were supposed to outline. This is the case in anthropology. This spontaneously
relativist discipline allows objects, rites, practices and various institutions to
proliferate: its task consists essentially in carefully opacifying irreducible realities
made denser by these heterogeneously accumulated mediations. This relativism
comes at no cost to anthropology, which is not afraid of objects: it accepts them
as cultural markers, but does not endow them with any intrinsic value. Behind
this easy-going attitude lies the indistinct transformation of objects into distinctive
social characteristics. This frees anthropology from the need to analyse them
critically, as opposed to what happens in sociology: the excessive severity of
sociology corresponds to anthropology’s excessive understanding. Anthropology
feels compelled to be less relativistic and comparatist only in the rare moments
when it attempts to achieve a synthetic perspective by considering the possibility
of a horizontal resolution.
A.-C. Taylor puts it very well:
A rigorously “historicist” or culturalist perspective can lead us to wonder what

point there is in retracing the particular evolution of the singular phenomena
which we analyze, since their local trajectory will tell us nothing about history
in general, or about the singularity of the phenomena, which is a primary fact.
(1988, p. 157, in Descola et al.)
But if, following in Durkheim’s footsteps, objects are sacrificed to the principle
according to which they are interpreted, priority is given to the development of a
general model. Whereas, somewhat in spite of itself, anthropology gives a new
lease of life to Durkheim’s excessively depleted mediation, sociology follows in
Durkheim’s footsteps. In the United-States, this has led either to a very Durkheimian
brand of positivist anthropology, or to an empirical focus on fieldwork research
centred on actors and interaction, and which substitute the power of actors to create
their world to the power of things. In France, this has led instead to a sustained
attempt at a generalised unveiling, as critical thought consistently gave itself the
task of substituting a social causality for apparent causes. The critical tradition of
European sociology was the least ready to accept the notion that actors produce
their world: in this tradition, rehabilitating the constructs of the actors was merely
a first step – once described they had to be re-attributed to illusion.
Let us conclude this rather hopeful attempt at giving a panorama of the
treatment of objects in the social sciences by focusing on these two symmetrical
trends: the adoption of a critical stance, together with the return to the actor, make
up the conflictual framework of modern sociology.
From a Theoretical Error to a Theory of Error: Critical Sociology
Where does the power of things come from? Does it come from things themselves,
or from the social group surrounding them? How wonderfully crystal clear this
opposition is. Although sociology was to muddy the waters with a thousand murky
arguments, it would not do so like ethnology, which in practice reconsidered an
opposition it maintained in theory (when it did not ignore it): instead, sociology
highlighted with increasing complexity the theoretical mechanism linking objects
to the social. To what, to whom, and how should the cause which animates objects
be attributed? Durkheim remained a rationalist: moving from the natural model
of the native to the cultural model deciphered by the scholar, he maintained the
notion that indigenous people misattributed the cause of the power, and that this
error merely had to be corrected: a new cause (society) had to replace the previous
one (the totem of indigenous people). But he did not explain their error itself.
On the contrary, under Bourdieu’s pen, critical sociology positioned this error
at the heart of its theory, turning it into what had to be explained – or indeed into
the social itself, which is no longer the positive cause of our representations but
the denial of the attribution of causes through which we naturalise the world, by
endowing our objects with their properties and by asserting our competence as
subjects. The social is less the denied cause of our beliefs than the denial which
causes us. Producing ‘truths that are not so much unknown as repressed’ (Bourdieu
1990b, p. 107), the sociologist turns objects into ‘pure creations of social belief’
(ibid., p. 141). The point of his objectivism is not to show that the beliefs of actors
are erroneous or that they refer awkwardly to a positive reality, but to encompass
‘the individual or collective, private or official, subjective illusion against which
it has had to win its truth’ (p. 107). The ‘social critique of the judgement of taste’
(Bourdieu 1984a) constitutes the apex of this theory of denial: ‘Music represents
the most radical, the most absolute form of denial of the world, and especially of
the social world, that is achieved by any art form’ (1993b, 104).
In contrast with Durkheim, Bourdieu gives a foundational status to the
attribution of the cause. Instead of taking it as an instrumental and logical
operation which indigenous people get wrong and the sociologist right, he makes
this misattribution the very principle of the social. No longer passively erroneous,
this false attribution is an active process of denial, and sociologists are there to
reveal this operation. It is an archetypal social operation: with it, the explanation
of things by human beings mutates from a circular, tautological model to a linear,
natural model. And from the sociologist’s viewpoint now, the world is at last
cleansed of the murky confusion of a primitive state where men are in things and
things are in men, and is divided into purely social subjects wielding insubstantial
symbols, and purely natural objects, which sociologists have nothing to say about.
Durkheim instilled a poison into sociology:14 after him, whether they were turned
into pure signs or pure things, objects would escape sociology.
A theory of mediation rejects this slippage, which leads to the dizzying pleasures
of arbitrariness and the murky satisfaction of denouncing the vacuity of all things
human. Regaining the right to stop and consider objects does not so much entail
14
Traces of this poison are to be found in the slippage which led Bourdieu to
consistently denounce the belief in objects as a form of ‘social magic’, cf. ‘The Interest of
the Sociologist’ (1990a, p. 88). Highly communicable, the mania for magic also operated in
the works of artists themselves: ‘Painting, since Duchamp, has provided countless examples,
of which you are all aware, of magical acts which, like those of the couturier, so clearly owe
their value to the social value of the person who produces them that the question to ask is
not what the artist creates, but who creates the artist, that is, the transmuting power that the
artist exercises’ (1993b, p. 147).
an indignant rejection of Bourdieu’s radicality (he anticipated the mechanism of

denial underlying this outrage) but a demonstration of its timorousness. It is easy
to make denunciations, but it is also easy to be outdone at this game. Bourdieu’s
denunciation of the illusion of the object leans on an ever more powerful form of
counter-objectivity: the counter-objective rules of the social game. Aside from
professional corporatism, there is no reason not to go all the way. This is what
R. Girard did when he developed his theory of the constitutional arbitrariness of
desires that were all the more firmly asserted for being servile copies (1961, 1972,
1978): relating all our objects to the illusion of a denied differentiation, Girard
relegates the social, as everything else, to the objective disguises that subjects
create for themselves. His radicalism outstrips Bourdieu’s: he takes the theory
of arbitrariness to extreme ends. Indeed, sociologists of arbitrariness appear
lukewarm in comparison with Girard, since they end their critique of objectivity
at the doors of the social sciences, which they are duty-bound to defend. Girard’s
extremist position has the merit of highlighting the weakness of the double game
that critical sociology plays with the object, by turn denouncing it as an illusory
belief and claiming it as a scientific criterion, depending whether it is presented by
the subjects under observation or by the sociologist. Girard shows ab absurdo that
one cannot refuse – as we think it is legitimate to do – the prophetic quality of the
apocalyptic disappearance of objects in the mimetic spiral of desire, without also
renouncing the benefits of the theory of arbitrariness and its ambiguous charms.
The only solution we have left is to take mediation seriously: this involves neither
reducing it to the empty mechanics of desire, nor turning it into sociology’s
Trojan horse, but considering it as an operation which fills the world with hybrid,
irreducible, composite objects.
Girard is one of the precursors of the infinite regression which is part of any
theory of arbitrariness. In the same critical vein, post-modern theories have taken
this regression beyond the point where Bourdieu left it. Writing on the media,
fashion (1968), and consumption (1970, 1972), Baudrillard ‘radicalised’ the same
process, falling back on ethnological escapism: obsessed by your waistline, sex,
fitness, you are caught in the ‘hymning of the body’ by your Ego consumans,15 and
you think that things are what they are, when they are merely signs. In contrast with
Durkheim’s positivism or Bourdieu’s sociologistic discourse, he adds (although
this really amounts to another substraction) that they are only signifiers without
signifieds, signs which lose their referent as they proliferate, becoming simulacra:
There are no causes left, and you haven’t noticed it! This regressive movement
always returns to the previous cause to turn it into a lure, in the name of an even
more negative causality. In the end (if one can speak of the end, since endings are
always provisional) the movement is the same whether the social lies behind signs,
15
Cf. Baudrillard (1998, p. 99) and ‘Pop: An Art of Consumption ?’ (1998, Part III
(‘Mass media, Sex, and Leisure’), pp. 114–18). The author’s ‘critical nostalgia’ (1998,
n. 16, p. 200) leads him to understand the humour of pop art in light of the consumers’
collusion with their objects.
or whether there is nothing there, and it leads us further and further away from
Durkheim’s simple substitution of causes (where actors had their cause, which the
sociologist ousted, replacing it with his own). It turns the attribution of a cause
itself into its object and it places this attribution at the heart of social mechanics.
As it becomes less and less possible to assimilate it to a physical reality, this
attribution becomes a principle of self-dissimulation which does not have its own
objects but lurks behind all objects – a thesis probably best expressed by Bourdieu.
The social is no longer the hidden materiality which the sociologist must uncover,
as with Durkheim, but the tautological movement of actors who hide it behind the
materiality of objects. From Girard to Baudrillard, or Bourdieu, the sterile image
of the mirror is never far away:16 as for the materiality of the social, this is merely
an illusion generated by the actors and classified as arbitrary by the sociologist.
No Generalisations Please: Sociologies of the Actor
What happens to the social treatment of objects when we turn to the other
sociological alternative: that is, to the democratic optimism which seeks to
reassign competence to actors, rather than side-step the issue ad infinitum
as critical sociology does, while increasingly disempowering the actors.
American sociology, for instance, attempts to return to basics, by relinquishing
falsifying generalisations in favour of the ethnographic analysis of the actors’
representations: keen on empirical research, it remains in this sense closer
to Durkheim’s rationalism. However, the social has become the sum of the
relations which allow the actors to mutually define each other as well as their
world.17 Along the way, in contrast to Durkheim, who shared these concerns
with indigenous people, we have lost track of the possibility that actors might be
interested not only in their interactions, but also in discussing and establishing
16
Bourdieu’s outlook is too scientific for him not to find distasteful the self-flagellation
of the intellectual which this spiral of reflexivity leads to (since it is no longer a matter of
looking at the world, but of watching the onlooker looking at it). He waited until Homo
academicus (1984b) to put this into practice in his own idiosyncratic way, underlining ‘the
gulf between two relations to the world, one theoretical, the other practical’ (1990b, p. 14),
and calling instead for a sociology ‘expressing the social determinants of different forms of
practice’ (1990a, p. 15).
17
‘We find ourselves with one central obligation: to render our behaviour
understandably relevant to what the other can come to perceive is going on’, Goffman
(1983, pp. 50–51). Although at odds with this view on other points, interactionism,
ethnomethodology, ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) or indeed ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser
and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1990) also share in this denial of the actors’
competence to make generalisations, which comes from further away and finds its roots
in the positions of H. Mead, or H. Blumer in this case: ‘The meaning of objects for a
person arises fundamentally out of the way they are defined to him by others with whom
he interacts’ (1969, p. 11).
the causes of their collective action. Just as the sociologist forbids himself to use
generalisations in his method, he also forbids the actors to make generalisations
in practice: on principle, his empiricism ignores the principles of the actors, their
attempts at self-justification, and therefore the importance they lend to common,
complex and irreducible objects which constitute them all the more for having
been made by them. For interactionists and ethnological fieldwork researchers,
objects are ultimately as transparent as those of critical sociology. In the case
of art, which is what interests us here, this empirical sociology has opted more
modestly – and regrettably – to manage the problem of the attribution of causes
by validating its professional identity in terms of technical knowledge. It has
become a tool box among others, in order to be able to manipulate phenomena
with its tools: profession, organisation, institution, market, convention, network,
etc. It has become a sort of unself-critical realism which is unaware of how
reductive it is: these intermediary notions are simultaneously taken to be
diverse aspects of the reality under scrutiny and partial sociological explanatory
principles, which are treated as though they were independent from their object.
We do not claim to have surveyed all possible types of causality. Sociologists
have imagined other solutions. Some blurred the line even more between the actors
and the sociologist, as J. Favret-Saada (1977) dared to do: in order to analyse the
practice of witchcraft, she argues that one must perform the attributions of power
oneself, instead of ‘externalising’ them through theoretical distance. Others on
the contrary increase the distance between the actors and the sociologist. This
is what the ‘sociology of critique’ (so named in contrast to critical sociology) of
L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot (1991) does: in order to understand the participation
of actors without denouncing or endorsing it, they argue that one must theorise it,
in order to quit the constitutive oscillation between engagement and criticism and
turn criticism and engagement into the object of analysis.
Proliferation or Reduction: Objects are Never in Question
By focusing on the dichotomous cases of critical sociology and the sociologies of

the actor, we wished to emphasise that the question which we set ourselves – i.e.
the question of the differential and localised treatment of objects which allows
for the combined power of objects and human beings and for the constitution
of natural-cultural hybrids in the place of the unmediated dualism of signs and
things – it seemed as though sociology was labouring under Durkheim’s spell,
with the relationship to the object a taboo. As we analyse the positions which
sociologists have adopted towards – or against – art objects, we shall see that,
beyond their oppositions, they fit very nicely along the axis which was defined
by the theory of belief. We believe, along with B. Latour (1991) or L. Boltanski
(1990), that only a conversion – and the mourning this supposes – will allow
sociology to recover its ability to see objects on the one hand (Callon and Latour’s
sociology of techniques opened up this path), and on the other, its capacity to
recognise that actors have knowledge (starting with their critical faculties: this is
the path which Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of justification opened up).
How can one account for objects without being either too indiscriminating (i.e.
accepting them all, rather than reducing them to mere representatives of culture)
or too exclusive (i.e rejecting them for representing the collective stakes which
found the social)? Anthropology manages on the one hand to paint large, potent
and incompatible canvases of various societies (culturalism) and on the other to
give general models asserting their indifference to contents (structuralism). It thus
hesitates between the proliferation of mediating objects and the obliteration of
illusionary objects, showing itself incapable of measuring the unequal resistance
which objects offer to their social or cultural transformation: it is too free towards
objects which remain excessively distant and have no value in its eyes. Sociology
brings the same polite indifference towards objects back home, in our own
societies. In the process, both disciplines elude the question of the relationship
to objects equally casually. Sociology does this through a critical stance which
disqualifies objects from being the artefacts of social mechanisms, or through an
empiricism which sees objects as what the actors make of them. Anthropology
achieves the same neutralisation of the object through the distance created by its
remote relationship to the cultures which it observes, considering them as a whole,
with all their objects. What this cursory survey of these disciplines suggests is that
they both fail to account for the different levels of resistance of objects, caught as
they are in a Durkheimian dualism which by turn make them consider objects as
either inert things which are independent of human beings, or social signs emptied
of all matter.
Disciplines that focus on art have managed to avoid this dilemma through a
differentiated analysis of objects endowed with a value that matters. There is much
to learn from their conflicts and from the solutions which they found: the problems
are the same with art, except that it demands to work under the maximum constraint
of the objects. There is a radical difference between the lack of significance which
the ethnologist or the sociologist lend to the general run of objects produced, and
the extreme importance objects have in the case of art, where they are at the centre
of the investigation and cannot merely manifest their presence in the analysis as
passive witnesses of their own truth or as vehicles of social representation. The
art object constrains the disciplines which focus on it to take a stand on questions
of value, making it impossible for them to tolerate the peaceful cohabitation of
contradictory notions. Although initially this led to great polemical tensions, it
also made it more possible – as the new history of art would show – to resolve
the problems of mediation in practice, without endorsing the Durkheimian split
between natural reality and the world of the sacred, which is so much at odds with
all analyses of art works.
Having noted that this split constantly leads to failure, the programme which
we have set ourselves – focusing on the term ‘mediation’ and on the case of
music – is now clearer: we shall refrain from resorting to the binary opposition
of socialisation or naturalisation in our explanations, but will instead turn this
oscillation into our ‘theme’. Through these two symmetrical endeavours, we shall
attempt to seise the local and continuous accumulation of human and physical
heterogeneous procedures through which actors seek to consolidate the world.
We shall therefore accept that objects are hybrid and composite: not so much
somewhat social and somewhat natural, as lukewarm liberalism would have it,
seeking a happy medium, but constantly caught up in the social work involved
in establishing and questioning them. Only by following up these processes of
reciprocal incorporation can we move from the most local, punctual, practical
causes to the most general, common, theorised reasons without resorting to a
solution of continuity. This is what writing on mediation involves: rather than
theoretically obliterating the objects we come across by turning them into signs or
accepting them as things, this means showing this double process constantly at work
in the practices of the actors in order both to establish their objects (by naturalising
them: that is, by turning them into things which have power, and by doing the
same with the subjects which confront them) and to call them into question (by
challenging their power: that is, by showing where it comes from, mobilising the
interests which lie behind objects and socialising them). The oscillation between
a linear model where cause and effect are linked up by an intermediary and a
circular model where action produces the allocation of roles of cause and effect,
accounts for a world that is composite and filled with hybrid objects, as opposed
to the sociologist/naturalist juxtaposition of two sealed realities, one made up of
human beings and empty signs, the other of plenary objects which are foreign
to man.
Transition
Restoring the Mediators:
One Method for Two Programmes
All art works – and art altogether – are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an
irritation to the theory of art.
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 2004, p. 160
Although they each started from different principles, the two rival disciplines of
art history and the social history of art achieved a paradoxical convergence. In this
section, we shall focus on how they managed to go beyond the dualism of aesthetic
and social approaches to works of art, which initially set them at odds with each
other. Of course the history of art can justifiably be discussed from many other
perspectives: nevertheless, right from the start, the evolution of historical and
sociological approaches to art involved a continuous and increasingly theoretically
subtle attempt to restore its various mediations to art, even though the status of
these mediations would then prove as varied as the interpretations they yielded.
A Beautiful Consensus
In order to highlight how ubiquitous the theme of mediation is even in the most
diverse currents of thought – and how perplexing it is – we shall quote a penitent
tribute to the Marxist, Goldmann:
Goldmann makes Marxism stand stronger against the criticisms levelled at it …

by multiplying the number of intermediaries between the social group and the art
work (the worldview of a social group, then the coherence of a literary structure)
and by establishing their correlations step by step. (Bastide 1977, p. 41)
The terms of this assessment of the discipline also apply to the social history of art.
In order to escape the dilemma between facile analogies and the impossibility
of establishing determining relationships between society and artistic creation, the
social history of art turned to analysing the many mediations that exist between
artistic production and society at a given time, before focusing more simply … on
the socio-economic conditions of the creation and the reception of works of art.1
1
Bonfait (1989, in Moulin (ed.), pp. 59–60): note the phrase ‘more simply’ which –
out of disappointment or realism? – marks the slippage from ‘mediations’ to ‘conditions’.
In contrast with the incisive assessment that E. Castelnuovo had already made
in 1976, this article emphasises how much more present the social history of
art has become, as well as economic history, quantitative history, the history of
patronage, the history of the viewing public, the history of taste, etc.
Finally, where sociology is concerned, this report on ‘the social sciences and
art’ states that:
French sociological research in the fields of literary and artistic production …

as well as foreign – particularly American – research on the laws of cultural
production and the worlds of art,2 show just how important it is to the sociology
of artistic creation to analyse the mediations between the socio-economic
conditions of creative work and the public life of the works, their reception.
(Menger nd, p. 58)
Although the word ‘mediations’ seems to have merely an institutional meaning

here, the author then goes on to propose ‘a series of more specific investigations
of the different categories of mediators and agents of artistic diffusion in direct
contact with creators’ (p. 59).
This unusual interdisciplinary consensus may probably be explained by the
fact that by making the mediators of art their privileged object of study, the social
sciences found an area of expertise that was their own, as opposed to aesthetic
approaches centred on art itself. It seems that anyone wishing to explore the
problem of the relationship between art and society must begin with a study of
mediations. Yet, nothing is fixed past that point: this has led to a very wide range
of explorations of the modalities of their divide and of their possible articulations,
from aesthetic studies of the contents of the works to social studies of the
circumstances, contexts or conditions of their production and diffusion, as well as
of styles and tastes.
At one extreme, we have the mechanical complementarity of two watertight
registers: art, on the one hand, and the social, on the other. This is the position that
A. Silbermann takes on music:
“Music”, in fact, is not a concrete thing, and this makes sociological analysis
of music as such extremely difficult. Hence, then, the failure of those pseudo-
sociologists who, in spite of frequent warnings, persist in undertaking the
impossible: trying to analyse music as such sociologically. (1963, p. 68)3
2
Menger refers in particular to Becker (1974, 1988) and Peterson (1976).
3
I. Supičić returns to this position, but with an amusing twist: whereas Silbermann
made it permissible to neglect uselessly worrisome artistic contents, Supičić forbids it:
‘An authentic conception of the sociology of music excludes all interference that might
distort valid conceptions of music, or diminish its aesthetic and artistic values … Moreover,
by virtue of its scientific nature, the sociology of music is obliged to refrain from value
judgements concerning the artistic and aesthetic aspects of music’ (1987, pp. 12–13, 36).
Restoring the Mediators: One Method for Two Programmes 41
On the other side of the divide, this division of roles also satisfied art historians,
whose general opinion on this question is expressed here by E.H. Gombrich: ‘It is
when we come to these questions concerning value, questions which are and will
remain central to the art historian, that the social scientist would, I think, have to
refuse to be drawn’ (1979, p. 155).
At the other extreme, sociology and art attempted to cancel each other out.
Some, especially sociologists, maintained that art was ‘merely’ the mark, the
reflection, or the denial of the social,4 while aesthetes lived in the hope that their
dark designs would meet with failure: ‘And what if we found that there is no
such thing as a sociology of musical works – whether of a Beethoven sonata or a
Bach fugue?’5
The absence of any relationship between art and society characterises the
symmetrical positions of liberals and those who seek their annexation: both refuse
to acknowledge mediation. Fortunately, this is a minority position. For the most
part, the literature on this question adopts an intermediary stance, asking what
is the relationship between art and society, pondering that question, inventing a
whole range of more or less partial and reciprocal forms of causality and influence
between various elements of art and social factors. These works have given these
realities a range of configurations and have established their various aspects in
relationship with each other. However, what we wish to emphasise is that it is as
though these works shared the same imperative regarding their method, and as
4
This idea goes back a long way: ‘L’œuvre d’art n’émeut que ceux dont elle est le
signe [An art work only moves those it signifies]’, wrote Hennequin a century ago (La
Critique scientifique). Introducing a characteristic while simultaneously pushing into the
background and disqualifying it, the French negative construction ‘ne … que’ is typical of
analyses which demystify delegation, and we will come across it often. Bourdieu constantly
resorts to this construction when he speaks of social representation: ‘acte de magie qui
permet de faire exister ce qui n’était qu’une collection de personnes plurielles … sous la
forme d’une personne fictive, une corporatio [the performative power of designation, of
nomination brings into existence in an instituted, constituted form (that is as a ‘corporate
body’, a corporatio …]’ (1987, p. 189)’ ‘what existed up until then only as a collectio
personarum plurium, a collection of multiple persons’ (1990a, p. 138)). Bourdieu cancels
the line of mediations – you are not what you claim to represent – relegating the love of
art to a form of distinction which is stylised and in denial. Similarly, music is merely a
means towards achieving a trance according to G. Rouget, cf. p. 11. The use of this turn
of phrase in effect accuses intermediaries of unfaithfulness in the name of a notion which
the construction itself planted. This accusation exhibits its success: the mediators have
succeeded so well that they have to be erased. This question, to which we will return in
our discussion of the case of Baroque music (Part II, ch. 1) may also be made in relation to
the teaching of music to children, cf. Hennion and Schnapper (1986), and infra, Chapter 7.
5
J.-J. Nattiez (1975a, p. 132). Nattiez’s musical semiology is founded on a
transcendental aestheticism through which he seeks to flee the social, which is by definition
embedded in circumstantial events: ‘Transcendence is very precisely an escape from socio-
historical contingencies which tangentially brushes past the absolute’, as he explains in Le
Paradoxe du sociologue (1989, p. 145), implicitly criticising Menger (1983).
though this imperative were at odds with frontal approaches to the works: all these
ways of setting art and society in relation with each other – including the most
abstract of them, and those that are least wary of generalisations – seek first and
foremost to draw attention to the particular role which this or that mediator plays.
This mediator can be social (the rise of a class …) cultural (the Geist, the ‘view’
of a period, a milieu …), institutional (the market, the academy …), technical
(printing, IT …), human (the figure of the patron, the humanist adviser …), unless
they attribute this role of mediation to the art object itself. However diverse these
attempts, they share a surprisingly similar method: they erect a screen between art
and the social, allowing the one to be deciphered in terms of the other.
Unruly Mediators
Approaches to such intermediary objects by sociology and by art history are

just as contradictory as those of sociology and anthropology. As opposed to art
history, sociology tends to examine the vast field of the relationships that can
be established between art and society by positing a theoretical and overarching
relationship between them, which means that, deep down, it is hostile to
mediators. Although sociology initially needs mediators in order to counter the
causes which others have established, in the end it seeks to eliminate these others
behind the new social cause they have brought to light. Hence the embarrassed
tones in which sociologists speak when their failure to find a general explanation
constrains them to recognise the importance of these mediators: ‘Reductive forms
of sociologistic discourse … have been overtaken by theories of art which take into
consideration all the complex institutional, ideological, and aesthetic intermediary
stages between the work and the conditions of its production’ (Vander Gucht
1989, p. 62). By contrast, art history lavishly multiplies the mediations that exist
between art and the most varied aspects of the reality surrounding it, usually
without bothering to theorise this constant work of restoration, which it treats as
an end in itself. Unlike sociology, art history does not fuss over the restoration of
these mediations because not only does it not have anything to denounce, but it has
no need to be rid of them, since it does not wish to show anything else. Drawing
a comparison between these two perspectives shows just how very differently the
restoration of the mediators can be understood. Although sociology and art history
are both methodologically defined by this strategy of mediation, which distances
them from aesthetic commentaries on the works or the soul-baring of art lovers,
this is where the similarities between the programmes of these two disciplines
end. Where one seeks a reductive explanation, the other seeks a proliferation of
explanations. Where one seeks to establish causes, interpret them and substitute
them, the other seeks to accumulate them, comment on them and superimpose
them one onto the other.
Sociology proceeds by taking two contradictory steps. Compared with the
more natural, unproblematised stance of art history, it is more aggressive (and
Restoring the Mediators: One Method for Two Programmes 43
explicit) when it introduces the mediators which it needs (patrons, markets,

institutions) in order to interrupt the beliefs of actors: however, it is also more
ruthless in its attempts to obliterate them afterwards. This pendular movement
reaches its apex when sociology confronts an art object in particular: to interpret
it is to decipher its social cause, in order to rid it of its opacity as a singular object.
In other words, turning an object into a mediator means turning it into the vehicle
for a sociologically intelligible principle. However, sociology operates the same
displacement in the case of the actions of a particular merchant, or the regulations
of an academy: once they have been evoked, sociology must rapidly show the
market, or the bureaucracy which is at work behind them. For the sociologist,
mediators are rather dubious – i.e. concrete, isolated, unreliable – indices for which
they must substitute the abstraction of a general cause, of which they become the
unconscious agents.
In contrast, lifting his gaze from a great heap of causes and barely able to
suppress the pleasure he feels at each unplanned new addition to a succession of
events that is always unpredictable,6 the art historian smiles benevolently at the
naivety of the sociological project and – often explicitly – seeks to challenge all
attempts at generalisation. Mediators, for him, are not representatives that must
be made transparent: they add on the contrary another level of complexity to the
picture, making it all the more opaque.7 As Haskell insists in another preface:
‘nothing in my researches has convinced me of the existence of underlying laws
which will be valid in all circumstances’ (1980, viii).8 The conflict between these
two perspectives projects onto art the standard opposition between the cumulative
erudition of historians and the reductionism of sociologists in search of general
causes: that is, between those who seek to establish the facts of the past and
those who wish to theorise them. However, since the search for causes inevitably
entails challenging those of the actors themselves, it was only natural for critical
epistemology to welcome sociology into its bosom. There is nothing occasional
about the stance of demystification that sociology adopts: on the contrary,
demystification is intrinsic to its logic.9
6
Cf. Gombrich (1979, ch. 2).
7
The field of aesthetics has often played on the semiological theme of the opposition
between opacity and transparency, cf. Junod (1976), or Marin (1989), whose extraordinary
aesthetics of walls turns the surfaces on which Italian frescoes are painted into one of their
active analytical principles.
8
Whereas Haskell’s best books, it seems to me, take the risk of coming up with their
own explanation, while also radically rethinking what an explanation of art or taste may
entail (Haskell 1963/91, Haskell and Penny 1988), his more relativistic works (Haskell
1986, or 1989) are conceived entirely negatively around series of counter-examples
designed to prevent any possible generalisation.
9
L. Boltanski developed this idea when he proposed to move from a critical sociology
to a sociology of the critique in ‘Ordinary denunciations and critical sociology’ (2012,
pp. 18–27).
Yet, as the convergence of the lines we have quoted shows, even if these two
approaches are based on antithetic perspectives, the restoration of mediations
constrained them to ask similar questions. In order to show the double movement
which brought them closer, we shall start with the sociological approach, where
the return of the mediators is akin to the return of the repressed: instead of being
replaced by their explanation once they have fulfilled their task as levers against
aestheticism, the ‘intermediary stages’ that Vander Gucht was calling for remain.
They seem all the more present for their opacity, even though initially they were
the agents of an agreed cause. And, as we shall see, the vigorous stand-off between
the sociology or art and the sociology of culture, for instance, depends in the end
precisely on the space which each of these disciplines grants to the cumbersome
accumulation of intermediaries which they had started to interpose between art
and society.
In contrast, the history of art presents us with texts that are weak on theory
but ultra-sensitive to mediation. It seems to me that it is not so much the
sociology of art – which remained constrained by a programmatic outlook for
too long – as art history which, volens nolens, came up with the rudiments of a
genuine sociologisation of art, even as it placed itself under the moral authority
of aesthetics: as though labouring under a return of the repressed going in the
opposite direction, art history became sociological without realising it! I am,
however, more interested in narrowing rather than widening the gap between
them. I wish to use the explicit character of the sociologist’s restoration of
mediators in order better to distinguish between the different types of causality
which the unveiling of mediators introduces in art and in the social (whatever
Haskell may think, these sociological causalities do not merely limit themselves
to enunciating the ‘underlying laws which will be valid in all circumstances’…).
This done, I shall borrow from the virtuosity and sensitivity which the history of
art displays towards the heterogeneous and contradictory manner in which these
causalities work, in order to benefit from the richness of the examples which it has
analysed, unlike the sociology of art, which gives the impression of having merely
unearthed skeletons.
Chapter 2
Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art
The theory of representation itself had a history.

L. Marin, Opacité de la peinture, 1989, p. 10
The System of Tastes and the Life of Forms: The Premises of the
Sociology of Art
It is helpful to go back to the beginning of the evolution of the sociology of art:1

instead of producing analyses which gradually started to take better account of the
art object, the logic of the positions adopted on this question widened the divide
between aestheticism and sociologism: that is, to speak in Durkheimian terms,
between approaches seeking to locate the power of the work within the object itself
and those which find it behind the object. As we shall see, sociology would end up
settling for stability in a general principle centred on a theory of belief: what was
really under analysis was not the work itself, but the fact that we bow down before
it. However, the nascent discipline of sociology was also motivated by another
interesting disposition: the need to respect the specific mediations of art would
become an increasingly rigid methodological requirement. This professional
criterion distinguished it from other interpretations of art which had a sociological
bent. Sociology looked down on generalisations born of a direct reading of the
work: that is, the notion that meaning lies in the work and one need only decipher
it with a sociological lens in order to discover the social significance of art, the
ideologies of those who produced or consumed it, and the ‘eye’ or zeitgeist of a
century. It was equally disdainful of Marxist reductionism, according to which
meaning lies in the theory of society, class distinctions and modes of production,
and where art is read as ideology, and slots nicely into the position allocated to it
by the interpretative model.
Although one of these readings is idealistic and the other materialistic, both
are equally oblivious to intermediary processes. Both are immediate and, whether
they take the work or society as a starting point, both extract meaning from their
chosen term of reference only to project it onto the other. Let us focus on the
case of France as we launch out on this initiatory journey into the relationship
between art and society at the birth of the social sciences. Bastide (1977) gives
an excellent overview of the choices which imposed themselves from the start on
those who attempted to give a sociological interpretation of art. After Spencer,
Bastide offered a fine distinction between two symmetrical conceptions of the
1
In the case of France, one thinks for example of Ch. Lalo (1908, 1912), who invented
‘sociological aesthetics’.
sociology of art from Durkheim and Taine to Lalo and Focillon: whereas one
of these trends understood art in terms of a social determination, in a broad
sense (religious, economic, political, socio-cultural), the other recognised it as a
collective object. The terms of the debate, which are not in line with ours, focus on
subjectivism and on the then hotly debated question of the respective positions of
psychology and sociology.2 The first of these trends moved away from the works
in order to examine taste, the subject who judges the work, and the social system
which organises these judgements. The second trend focused on the contrary on
the forms and matrices which generate the works and lie behind them, in order
to uncover the greater social formations which produce them unbeknownst to
the artists. According to Bastide, the former focused its sociological analysis on
the subjects’ collective take on objects but ignored the objects themselves, while
the latter took the formation of objects as the target of its sociological enquiry,
dismissing the other approach as subjective. At the time, this second trend, which
proclaimed its superior objectivity, was clearly considered more sociologically
orthodox: the obstacle the discipline had to negotiate was the psychology of the
individual, which the first trend came dangerously close to espousing. Today, we
have the reverse orthodoxy: because sociology is now at odds with aesthetics, the
attempts the sociologists of the second trend made to discover the global logic
underlying various works is suspected of merely constituting a wider aesthetics,
with a sociological dimension tacked onto it.3
However, we wish to emphasise that, right from the very start, two antithetical
currents of thought placed works of art in a social perspective (while both ignored
the objects themselves): the first perceived them through the frame of their
collective appreciation, the other through the social structure or grammar which
had moulded them.4 The particular focus which these two schools placed either on
uncovering the social determination of subjects, or on the problematic deciphering
of the meaning of objects, prefigured subsequent debates between the sociology of
culture and the sociology of art.
2
Cf. the presentation M. Mauss gave in 1924 to the Société de Psychologie,
‘Rapports réels et pratiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie’ (1950, pp. 281–310),
and Durkheim’s many clarifications of the respective attributes of these two disciplines
(1894–1973, 1897–1960).
3
The anachronism that comes of projecting our categories onto the past is not
new. Emphasising how closely related accusations of rationalism and subjectivism are,
E. Panofsky remarked on this about perspective: although according to Plato it ‘replaced
reality and the nomos (law) with subjective appearance and arbitrariness … the most
modern aesthetic thinking accuses it, on the contrary, of being the tool of a limited and
limiting rationalism’ (1991, p. 71).
4
It is worth noting that whereas these two strategies are very much at odds with
each other for sociology – a theoretical discipline which must choose its cause – this is
not the case for most art historians, who consider them to be no more than complementary
social ornaments that can easily be juxtaposed to each other, as we will see with Gombrich,
Haskell and Baxandall.
Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art 47
Siding clearly with the first of these two schools, Lalo was a precursor. He
established most of the founding themes of the sociology of art and culture. To
wit, these lines on mediators: ‘The bulk of society is not what acts most directly
upon art. Society exerts its greatest impact on art through the intermediary of a
specialised milieu’ (1908, p. 320, quoted by Bastide op. cit., p. 44). Or indeed
those lines on the chiasmus which lies at the heart of the rhetoric of the social
sciences: ‘We do not admire the Venus of Milo for her beauty; she is beautiful
because we admire her’ (ibid.). Lalo took a decisive step forward by considering
that sociological interpretations of art before him had been mainly concerned
with mere preliminaries, when they noted the social aspects of the works – i.e.
the subject, the functions, etc. – which he called ‘anaesthetic’ (‘anesthétiques’).
Instead, for Lalo, the objective of the analysis was to uncover the social character
of its aesthetic aspects: norms of judgement, the reason why certain elements are
more highly valued than others, and the interplay of artistic milieux.5
In contrast, H. Focillon and É. Souriau positioned themselves on the side of
the object. However, this was an awkward way to frame the debate, as Bastide
contends. As Bourdieu would argue later, why not inflect these two paths in order
to make them converge towards the sociologisation of art? Far from being guilty
of covert subjectivism, the analysis of taste seeks to read the alleged freedom of
individual judgement in light of the hidden objectivity of the social (this path
leads straight to Bourdieu).6 As for the analysis of forms, it does not in any way
lead Focillon to return to a focus on the works themselves, nor indeed to an
improved aesthetics: far from restoring their autonomy to the works, his theory
of forms endows them with such a general impact that they become impossible to
distinguish from the social. Imprinting their mark onto all individual productions
without their creators realising it, the works follow the rhythm of their own
evolution (their ‘life’), which is irreducible to the subjects. It is almost as though,
for Focillon, the social was ‘an art lived by the group’ (a path which leads closer
to structuralism). La Vie des formes tirelessly rehearses a founding reversal, which
defines all mediations: instead of time and space being the external frame where
forms develop, it is form that creates time and space.7 ‘The life of forms constantly
renews itself and does not proceed through immutable facts which are constantly
5
See Lalo (1912); he also returned to these ‘unaesthetic’ questions in Lalo (1921).
6
He could have been the author of the line quoted above on the Venus of Milo; cf.
among hundreds of other quotes: ‘Aesthetic intention is what “makes” the work of art’
(Teyssèdre and Bourdieu 1969, p. 161); in 1957, Marcel Duchamp said: ‘Ce sont les
“regardeurs” qui font les tableaux’ (‘The spectator makes the picture’, 1975, p. 247).
7
Souriau (1929) brilliantly presented this thesis, emphasising with great originality
the unequal creative power of each work. This was to leave a profound mark on P. Francastel.
Throughout his life, he advocated a similar conception of space as ‘product’ (1951, p. 39):
‘Space is not a reality in itself of which only the representation varies depending on the
period. Space is man’s very experience, (it is …) the active transposition of the individual
and collective values that gave its shape to society’ (ibid., p. 360).
and universally intelligible. It brings about various geometries within geometry

itself, just as it creates the materials it needs’ (Focillon 1943–81, p. 49).8
Prefiguring structuralism, Focillon related objects to the social sphere9 through
form, just as Lalo had done to the subject by repositioning him within a general
system of judgements and the norms of a social milieu: although empirical research
had not yet begun, this would remain the framework of the French sociology of art
for a century. Achieving a synthesis of these two trends in order to overcome the
false dichotomies that the sociology of art had inherited – in particular between
the production and the reception of the works – would later become a common
objective. However, this would prove to be more of an agenda than a reality,
and research in this field was to remain very much in the shadow of these dual
oppositions.10 In the end the distance which was intended to allow sociologists
to grasp art produced mere intentions. Although Bourdieu staunchly refused to
endorse the opposition between the production and the reception of works,11 there
is nevertheless a striking imbalance between his many meditations on taste and
norms of judgement, and his rare analyses of the ‘Creators’, a term which he took
care to put between inverted commas.12 This opposition could not be overcome
without clarifying the role of the mediators: so long as sociologists perceived
8
It is the same with time: ‘A “milestone” is not a passive intervention in chronology,
but a ruffling of the moment’ (p. 99). Phenomenologists would also turn to this hypothesis:
cf. Schutz, for whom music performs the social through a ‘mutual tuning-in’ (1951, p. 162
in the 1964 Nijhoff edn). M. Halbwachs (1939) memorably summed up this idea when he
described music as ‘the collective memory of musicians’.
9
And to matter, which is more unusual. Focillon’s innovation lay in the very active
role he gave to ‘forms’, linking them to their material supports. His method, which
consisted in an erudite survey of great works, from Ancient Egypt to the moderns, found its
shortcoming in the fact he gave himself the right to bypass all the mediations of the actors
in order to define what great art works were and allow his free will to rule unchallenged as
he flitted from the one to the other.
10
Cf. Moulin (1986a) for a very thorough assessment of this question as well as a
presentation of the way the relationship to the works was understood (see in particular
Moulin, p. XV, Passeron, pp. 449–59, and Chamboredon, pp. 309–15).
11
‘… the sociologists … have done their best to confirm received ideas (… according
to which) sociology can give an account of cultural consumption but not of cultural
production … And research aimed at determining the social factors of cultural practice …
gives apparent confirmation to this distinction, which is based on no theoretical foundation’
in ‘But Who Created the “Creators”’ (1993b, p. 139). These lines precede a virulent attack
on reductionist sociologists (Lukács, Goldmann, Antal, Hauser, Adorno, and even Eco, in
The Open Work (1989)) who do not respect ‘the (relative) autonomy’ of the artistic field
(p. 140).
12
See Bourdieu (1966); in France, under the influence of Bourdieu, the second
generation of sociologists of culture did interesting research on the various milieux in
which ‘creators’ lived, from contemporary composers (Menger 1979, 1983), to painters
(Heinich 1981), art-house cinema (Darré 1986), jazz musicians (Fabiani 1986) and writers
(Ponton 1977, Viala 1985, Gamboni 1989). On the whole, however, literature is the art that
mediators to be no more than the accessories of their causes, their analyses

would lapse into direct readings of the works or of the taste for them. We need to
understand the mediators as the active producers of the art and audience they bring
together, if we wish to escape the sterile dualism of aesthetism and sociologism.
Opposed to the reductionism of Marxist interpretations, Bastide made a
powerful case for the idea that art reveals an unknown social imaginary. This is
what he wrote, at a time when the gap between examining the social determinism
of the works and looking for social significations inside the works was at its
greatest, in an argument which operates a characteristic reversal:
[We] started with a sociology which sought the social in art and ended with
a sociology which proceeds on the contrary from the knowledge of art to the
knowledge of the social … it is a matter of] studying the sociology of groups or
global societies through their aesthetic productions; [it is] sociology-as-method
vs sociology-as-objective. (1977, p. 49)
Francastel put it more lyrically – and less rigorously: ‘Art will allow us to reach
what the sociologist cannot see, being interested in institutions: the metamorphoses
of the sensibility, the dreams of the historical imagination, the variations of
classification systems, in a word the world views of the various social groups.’13
Art and the Revelation of the Social Imaginary
This vision, which Francastel reactivated, under the influence of German art
history,14 did not have the posterity it deserved. This was perhaps because, failing
sociologists have focused on most closely. The status of writers has attracted particular
interest: cf. Bénichou (1973), in France, or Easton (1964) and Rosengren (1968).
13
Francastel (1965, p. 203). These lines exhibit the latent connection between the
imaginary perspective and the critique of the categories of taste: the phrasing makes art
into a means of arriving at ‘classification systems’. Conversely, in Un art moyen Bourdieu
et al. would write the following, on the subject of photography: ‘The real unconscious,
for the sociologist … is to be found in the normal, banal, activity of the chap who takes
a photograph, when he decides on what is worthy of being salvaged from insignificance
and the annihilation of forgetting, “unconsciously” endorsing from within what the group
knows to be their deep values and thus offering them to a comprehensive and objective
reading’ (my emphasis, 1965, p. 331).
14
Following in the steps of great art historians such as J.J. Winckelmann, this tradition
was launched by encyclopaedically erudite German authors. The works of J. Burckhardt
(1860), for example, function as a sort of founding myth for art historians wishing to
show that art history has evolved into a genuinely ‘cultural’ history. Yet, Burckhardt’s
Kulturgeschichte stopped well short of representing such an evolution. Although
Burckhardt already inverted the perspective of art history, in order to focus not on the art
of the Renaissance, but on the notion that the Renaissance conceived everything in terms
to desist radically enough from producing commentaries of great works, it was

neither able to sustain the competition of traditional art history, which undermined
it from within, or the challenge of Marxist currents of thought, which cramped its
style from the outside. In France, these currents of thought had the most influence
until the 1960s. Later, they evolved into a search for the social determinations
of art, particularly in the wake of the self-criticism of some of the more lucid
followers of this trend, such as Goldmann (1976). The critical sociology of culture
came straight out of this. However, before moving on to this, our investigation of
the mediatory role of art requires us to look more closely at Francastel. To be sure,
Francastel did not really question the asymmetrical relationship of art and society:
according to him, the latter explained the former, at least in the last analysis.
Neither did he challenge the ability of the sociologist to give a direct account of the
signification of what was in front of his eyes, ‘thanks to the very precise analysis
of certain works, conceived as the product of an original activity of the mind’
(1965, p. 13). However, he showed that it was possible to proceed quite differently
from reducing art to its social determinants, by considering it as the known sign
of an unknown cause, the visible production leading to the invisible principle
of its production. Hence these lines, following on from the previous quotation:
‘The sociology of art is only meaningful if it allows us [through analysis, etc.]
to enrich the fundamental data from which the history and culture of the modern
world arise.’
Art no longer reflected society but revealed it, in the active sense of the
term. The unknown term of the art-society equation in the false debate between
materialism and idealism had been permutated, and influence was no longer
thought to proceed from society to art, as had generally been thought, but the
other way around. This was what Francastel meant when he spoke of his solitary
struggle15 against both an autonomous art history, on his right, and the Marxist
negation of its specific reality, on his left,16 as his analysis moved beyond the
literal meaning of works in order to define the ‘plastic spaces’ of a period and
of art, in reality poetry was what he was mostly set on in order to make a general case for
the birth of individualism. Yet, A. Warburg, E. Panofsky and E. Gombrich nevertheless
followed directly in his steps, as did also A. Riegl (1893, 1898) when, against materialism,
he conceived the well-known notion of Kunstwollen in order to describe a concept of artistic
volition which would allow him to link up audiences, thought and materials. Panofsky
would later criticise the idealism of this notion in ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’ (1981).
Also very critical was H. Wölfflin (1915–66, 1941–82) and his project of an ‘art history
without names’ – Focillon would allude to it – which sought to define style in terms of a
to-and-fro between form and society. In France, R. Klein (1970) continued this tradition
of thought.
15
He proclaimed his general isolation: ‘Sociology, history, and art history understood
in the usual sense of these terms are absent (from this book). And those who enjoy reading
art books will find it too abstract’ (1965, p. 9).
16
‘An art work is never a substitute for something else; it is the thing itself’ (ibid.,
p. 13).
their evolution (1951, 1967). However, he failed to take to its conclusion his
opposition to both the primacy of the works and their sociologistic reduction,
because he never renounced his excessive prerogative: seeking a direct
illustration of the eye of a century in its works.17 For Francastel, the mystery
of the production principle was not to be found in what produces art – i.e.
artists, milieux, techniques – but in the elusive imaginary and the frames of
perception which societies adopt without being aware of it. This was very close
to the Weltanschauung and his experiment has been relegated to a moment in
the history of ideas: it simply added art works to the written documents which
historians usually restrict themselves to.18 Although this was no mean feat, it
stopped well short of fulfilling his initial ambitions: allowing himself to bypass
the obligation to account for the actual production of the works in favour of a
‘problematics of the imaginary’ (1965, p. 9) regulated by the modern analyst, he
gave free rein to sociologism. Fighting against sociologism, he nevertheless left
it free to explore its interest in what produces art. This interest would eventually
lead to the rapprochement of sociology and art history, and also had the indirect
consequence of devaluing direct interpretations, perceived as merely exhibiting
the more or less controlled projections of the aesthetic values of their authors.
Following on from Francastel, authors such as J. Duvignaud or R. Bastide
(and Lalo before them) attempted to better integrate studies of the producers of
art and their public to the attempt to establish the relationship between different
artistic and social forms.19 However, beyond the fact that it led to this oscillation
between aesthetic commentary and ethnological interpretation, such a fusion of art
and society risked presenting myths as eternally true and beyond all verification
(Duvignaud 1980). Enquiries into the milieux of production or ‘the empirical
17
This also made him the target of criticism from art historians; cf. for example
Gombrich, who sought to discover ‘the reality of that closely-knit fabric which we call
culture’, and saw ‘no reason why the study of these connections should lead us back to the
Hegelian postulates of the Zeitgeist and Volksgeist’ (1979, p. 47).
18
Francastel (1965, p. 74) quoted Bloch on the ‘delicate connections’ between
society and art, which, as the latter recognised, held enormous potential for historians if
they learned to decipher it (1939, p. 96). Baxandall (1972) uses a similar method in his
work on the Quattrocento, while C. Ginzburg’s work on Piero della Francesca would do the
same for history (1994), cf. infra, pp. 127–35.
19
Writing on the theatre, Duvignaud defined four extended periods which each had
a dominant socio-political strategic take on the stage: the representation of classifications
in Classical antiquity; the staging of heretics in the Middle Ages; the Romantics’ in
camera mastery of the world; the modern proliferation of experiences (1973b, pp. 573–9).
Duvignaud aligned himself with the fundamental intuitions of R. Caillois (1950): theatrical
representation did not reflect the social, but – as with painting according to Francastel – it
revealed an often murky unknown; ‘externalising unplayed, possible, social roles …’ (ibid.,
foreword) and ‘manifesting the destruction of the heretical individual’ (p. 590), the theatre
dramatised ‘individual monsters of the in-between’ torn between the changing values
of society.
sociology of audiences’ were rare, to quote Bastide (1977, p. 200), who lamented
the fact that ‘for now, we lack [such monographs]’.20 The sociologists who had
an affinity with Francastel’s ‘problematics of the imaginary’ made regular and
vigorous calls for analyses of art which would be truly social without being
reductive, as though a curse had been cast on this programme, preventing it from
ever being realised. There is much to be learned from this relative failure. It thrives
on a radical distaste for the reductive – to use the traditional term – character
of sociology. Barely able to conceal his aversion to sociologism, Duvignaud
puts it bluntly: ‘P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron21 do not conceive the problem of
creation in any other way (than by ‘reducing the artistic experience to a milieu,
or by examining the contexts of art [audiences, elements that are secondary but
‘positive’] as though this allowed to grasp the substantial reality of creation’) and
in so doing, they erase it’ (1973a, note 1, p. 27). Considering these reservations,
it is not surprising that studies of what produces art, or of its audiences, remained
embryonic. The genuine interest these authors took in art inhibited them: they
considered that such analyses negated it.
Paradoxically, their vision of art as the mediation of the fundamental
sacred values of a society drew them surreptitiously but definitively away from
Francastel’s cultural and sociological reading. For him, what mattered was that
art should preserve an irreducible dimension. His followers opted for ethnological
regressions: the original mysteries of violence and the sacred and the richness of
rites and myths held such fascination for them that they displaced the mysteries of
aesthetic beauty. The ancestral father, the sacred, devoured its modern offspring,
art. Initially conceived as an active mediator, art went on to become an index,
before being relegated to the status of a trace, or a passive witness.22 From an
20
Cf. also the rudimentary statistics on the importance of music as merchandise or
reified good, which G. Friedmann deploys, alongside considerations on the role and place
of music in an industrial society, in order to support his argument on the role of techniques
in the modern dissemination of music (1979, ch. 6, pp. 235–53).
21
Duvignaud erroneously wrote R. Passeron, calling him Raymond, instead of Jean-
Claude, substituting the philosopher of aesthetics to the critical sociologist. As this slip of
the tongue was not corrected in the second edition, would it be over-interpreting it to relate
it to the general tone of the book, which is scathing towards any work that is unable to
recognise ‘the specificity of the imaginary experience’ (1973a, p. 26)?
22
In an article which is significantly entitled ‘An Ethnological Reading of Art’
(‘Lecture ethnologique de l’art’, Teyssèdre and Bourdieu 1969, pp. 177–208) J. Laude
wrote that art gave ‘precious and (precise) indications on the groups in the midst of which
it is produced’ (p. 177). Interpretation joined a more marginal current of the social analysis
of art, as historians bracketed off the artistic character of art objects in order to read them
as they would any other archival documents bearing witness to their time. Writing on
Holland, S. Schama used ‘Dutch art not as a literal record of social experience but as a
document of belief’, and asserted that he summoned paintings ‘as impressions of mentality,
not Vessels of art’ (1997, p. 10 and xi). Drawing on ‘the quality of social document inherent
in much of Dutch art’, he sought to reconstitute ‘the physical and mental bric-a-brac that
opaque screen where one might read the most secret representations of a society,
art became a transparent screen on which to write an imaginary representation
of society. Paradoxically, the issue of the value and the specificity of art has
disappeared, even though the proponents of this imaginary reading used this
question as a rallying flag in order to reject the reductionism of those who
advocated social readings of art. As with Durkheim, this question was cancelled
out by a primary regression towards the mechanisms of the sacred constitution of
our societies.
Art, Ideology and the Class Struggle
At the other end of the spectrum, those Marxist analyses of art which did not
overlook art works or creation in order to confine themselves to analyses of their
commercial distribution, and which managed to overcome an excessively rigid
theory of society, floundered on the obstinate mystery of the works. The more their
analyses attempt to make aesthetic categories appear obsolete, in order to consider
art works in the light of the relationship between production and class warfare,
the more the art works resist them, and the more the number of pages dedicated to
these works increases, like an obsession which only grows the greater with each
effort to reduce it … It is not by chance if the most persuasive Marxist analyses are
also those which deal with literary works. Literature being the least autonomous
of the artistic genres, it offers itself most straightforwardly to a reading of social
representations, even if this involves belated injunctions to respect the structure of
literary works. This practical advantage is merely a side effect of the theoretical
anxiety towards the works which makes Marxist authors flee less referential art
forms. We shall return to this trend in the section on social history,23 to which it can
be related through its historical productions, which are also its most interesting.
On a theoretical front, this Marxist critique came to fruition only in dealing with
the theory of the novel (L. Goldmann 1964, 1965), which it takes up from authors
such as Lukács (1971, 1967). Arvon (1970) gives an overview of this field, which
is saturated with works which are very far from engaging with the problems which
interest us here. Art always features in these works as a spoilsport as well as a
superfluous addition to their vision of the world. Depending on the critic, it is
dispatched as ideology or buried under laborious rationalisations. Discussions are
normative and focused on the dialectics of form and content, as well as on the
describe a culture’ (pp. 9–10 and xi). What he really seeks to show, contradicting Weber, is
that predestination is neither here nor there when one may become bankrupt at any point.
Resorting to a more or less controlled sense of irony, as well as to common sense and the
‘Batavian temperament’ (p. 3), he basically sought to cast the ‘moral geography’ (p. 15) of
the Dutch of the period in a less sombre light: in his opinion, the solemn rats of bankruptcy
must have mostly seemed comical to them … (cf. p. 371).
23
Cf. infra, Chapter 4, pp. 101ff.
symmetrical errors which arise from the neglect of either one of these terms, on
socialist realism (or how to get rid of it …), and on the danger of stating that art is
bourgeois, revolutionary, or proletarian. There are many assertions of principles,
denegations, and warnings, but few analyses.24
This failure is particularly obvious when it comes to painting or music.25 Thus,
in the 1970s, all French students of art owned a book issued by Maspéro – the
publisher of choice in the aftermath of May 1968 – entitled ‘Art History and Class
Warfare’ (Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes, Hadjinicolaou 1973). Some decades
later, its popularity is difficult to fathom. Beyond its characteristic contempt for
historians (who have all ignored class warfare) and sociology, that ‘“concession”
of the bourgeoisie to the rise of the worker’s movement and Marxist ideas’
(p. 58),26 the argument claims to be based on ‘the importation of a certain number
of concepts which have already been elaborated on elsewhere’: why bother to
rethink the theory of society after Marx and Althusser? The decision to opt for an
external relationship between art and society, and the hypothesis that we know
the social, both go without saying in that book. The social produces art: the
reverse seems to have been too absurd to contemplate. Discussion of the previous
literature in the field is limited to F. Antal.27 Preliminary theoretical warnings lead
to a few provisional and partial ‘summary analyses [of] particular images’ (p. 162)
in order to demonstrate what ought to be done, in a 25-page survey of 6 painters
(pp. 163–88). Thus, Hadjinicolaou declares Masaccio’s style typical of the
Florentine merchant bourgeoisie, which based its religious outlook on a rational
sensibility. As with Hauser,28 dialectics resolve many an issue. Ideologies are
declared ‘positive’ or ‘critical’ depending on whether it is easy (Rubens, David) or
difficult (Rembrandt, Goya) to link their analysis to the class which they represent.
24
Traditions endure, revamped in synthetic accounts which do not alter the basic
arguments. In the United Kingdom, J. Wolff added deconstruction and intertextuality (see
especially 1981) to an enduring model according to which art expresses social values: ‘The
two fundamental questions which must be answered by an adequate sociology of art and
literature are: (i) which social ideas, values, beliefs, are expressed in art? and (ii) how are
they thus expressed?’ (1975, pp. 54–5). The answer lies in defining the ‘societal world-
views’ (ibid., pp. 53–64) which the works express and according to which the artists and
their audiences recognise them.
25
Let us leave the case of Adorno aside for now, we shall dwell on it at length later,
cf. infra, pp. 59–68ff. The themes this philosopher touched on, as well as his interest in very
contemporary art and his visceral distaste for real political Marxisms and for folk art in all
its forms, make it difficult to connect him to Marxist trends.
26
Art historians do not fare any better: when it comes to these specialists of the art
works, there is a ‘danger (in) the very rigour of their analyses’ (p. 76)!
27
He ‘laid the foundations for a science of art history’ (p. 87); cf. infra, pp. 109–11.
28
We shall return to this author in the section devoted to social history, cf. infra,
p. 110, n.20. Although (or indeed because) Hauser was closest to Hadjinicolau’s positions,
the latter seldom referred to him, and was content simply to speak of his work in terms of
‘unsatisfactory essays’ (p. 27).
The author distinguishes himself from ‘literal-minded’ Marxists with a supposedly

irrevocable argument: he declares that the ‘ideology full of imagery’ (pp. 105–6)
of the artist’s style does not directly transcribe class warfare but represents the
values of a class, starting with the negation of class warfare. Pictures, according
to him, do not make class struggle visible so much as its effects and the ideologies
it gives rise to. Much like Hauser, he is always right, thanks to a dialectical agility
which allows the submission to and the subversion of norms to come down to the
same thing, ‘in the last analysis’.29
His approach is so radically at odds with the notion of mediation, that it allows
me to give an a contrario account of the minimal methodical conditions which
mediation supposes:
• On the one hand, these conditions imply following the operations

according to which the great moments of the history of art are selected,
without neglecting the paths which the works have followed in order to
reach us. In terms of the process that leads from the creation of the works to
their reception, it also demands a constant questioning of the simultaneous
constitution of valued works and the systems of appreciation, the milieux,
and the specialised vocabulary which allow their appraisal.
• On the other hand, and the two are inextricably linked, they imply not
distinguishing between the universe of the works and the social universe
as though they were two watertight entities, one of which automatically
held the causal power to interpret the other. Instead, the object of the
investigation must be the work which the actors do in order to make such
distinct realities appear, find the causes which connect them together,
establish some of these causes as the principle of others, and possibly agree
to identify some general causes.
It does not occur to Hadjinicolaou that he might analyse the mode of production
and marketing of the works. The actual mediators between art and society are
merely like grains of sand between two sheets of tracing paper. He has nothing
to say about the studios, academies, patrons, or market, which for him merely
and automatically represent class interests. There is an economic trend within the
Marxist tradition which adopts the reverse position. This is a more modest trend
which selects a partial phenomenon lending itself to a Marxist type of economic
analysis: the transformation of art into merchandise. Allowing for empirical
enquiry, these analyses are eager to limit their scope to the distribution of artistic
29
‘Looking at [this or that painting], one is struck by …’ (p. 188): why submit art
history to such a pummelling if it is to replace it with such a disarmingly paltry critical
apparatus? Beyond their naivety, his interpretations in effect borrow all their analyses to the
history of art. Merely gathering these interpretations under the umbrella of a history of the
social classes which leaves them intact, the author assents to the established hierarchies and
the criteria of taste and social judgements which he was supposed to challenge.
productions, and refuse to dwell on the aesthetic value or meaning of the works.
Losing the terrorist appeal which stemmed from the general reduction of art to
the ideology of a class, they attempt to show the increasing integration of the
cultural industries and the standardisation of their products, while nevertheless
acknowledging the existence of a mysterious ‘cultural specificity’.30 It was no
longer a question of showing that the contents of art are the products of class
warfare, but of asking: ‘How and why does capital come to increase its status by
turning the artistic sphere into a field from which commodities may be produced
and distributed?’ (Huet and al. 1978, p. 8). After making an obligatory reference to
W. Benjamin’s article on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
(1968) some monographs for example classify these spheres according to their
medium (photography, discs, audiovisual productions, engravings). These
monographs discuss such works in simplistic terms, through the technical
characteristics of their commodification, and tend to perpetuate old oppositions
between form and content, as well as between internal and external analyses. Yet,
these researches led to interesting hypotheses on the articulation of two sectors
where the operations and status of the producers are distinct and complementary:
the sectors of creation and of reproduction.31
Marxist economic analyses do not have the tools to bridge the gap between
an economic reading of the works as commodities which the Capital uses to find
new forms of reproduction, and a historico-political reading allowing them to
be deciphered as ideologies or illustrations of the values of the bourgeoisie. If
they resist this ideological reduction, they treat capitalism as though it were an
external machine which appropriates art in order to make a profit, and fall prey
to economicism. This tension reaches its apogee when it comes to mass culture.
Because their analyses understand mass culture as both the ideological expression
of the domination of the masses and the standardised production of consumer
goods seeking to create a need, they must present the very desire for domination
as the ambiguous need of the manipulated masses in order to conclude a coherent
argument. The masses are thus exploited twice over, both in their minds and in
their purses: they buy from a ‘culture industry’ which profits from their purchases
(economic analysis of the commodification of art) objects which themselves are
visual representations of the interests and values of the dominant class (ideological
analysis of contents).
30
In France, de Coster (1976), for example, based his analysis of the artisanal and
industrial poles dividing records on the opposition between ‘art and business’. In his
overview of the literature on the cultural industries, Vignolle (1980) wrote an economic
critique of this economic argument.
31
Artists ‘generate and direct musical innovation’ – to quote Attali (1985, p. viii) –
and as such conform to a different mode of production than the industrialists who make
copies of these creations; see for example Flichy (1980), Jaumain (1983), Miège, Pajon and
Salaün (1986), Busson and Evrard (1987).
As it happens, both the ‘idealist’ trend, which looks for the hidden imaginary
of societies in the works, and the ‘materialist’ trend, which seeks the hidden
values of the social classes or the implacable logic of capital behind the mystery
of the works, read equally directly into the works. Marxism posits the alternative
between either reading the objects or analysing their production in the same terms
that we saw used by the sociology of art at its beginnings. Both trends conceive of
the same geometrical opposition between two planes. They are equally indifferent
to the mediators which establish their relationship, one of which is known and
used to decipher the other. The only difference between these two trends lies in
the differing focus of their readings: just as one may alternately but exclusively
see the motif represented on wallpaper or perceive an imaginary figure (Sartre
2010, p. 36), the direct reading of art superimposes the plane of art and the plane
of society as one might two sheets of tracing paper. The imaginary reading focuses
on the opaque sheet devoted to art, and traces over the invisible social plane the
outline of the figures which it finds on the plane of the works. Conversely, Marxist
interpretations look right through what appears to them to be the transparent sheet
devoted to the works, to see the one which represents the social sphere; and,
knowing the outline of every one of its figures, they trace it again as they might
a hidden model on the sheet of tracing paper which is dedicated to the works. In
both cases, there is an ‘official figure’ and a ‘secret figure’ (ibid.), but they are
reversed. Equally powerless to produce interpretations which take into account
both the construction of artistic forms themselves and a rich representation of
the social, these two trends both latch similarly onto two major general processes
which are also easily articulated with each other. On the Marxist front, this leads
to the never-ending discovery, in the most varied paintings, of the multifarious
interests of an increasingly rampant bourgeoisie, that ogre of our childhood. As for
the trend which seeks to reveal society through an imaginary reading of the works,
this leads it to constantly rationalise the Western frames of visual representation,32
in particular with regards to perspective, that Renaissance miracle.33
A Miracle Solution: The Political Economy of Signs
A headlong turn to a model arguing that signs overwhelmingly manipulate

desires – as opposed to commodities manipulating needs – allows an escape from
32
Cf. Francastel (1967), Ong (1982). After Weber (1921), musical tonality would become
the focus of the same logic in the work of Shepherd and al. (1977), cf. infra p. 112, n.24.
33
Specialist discussions of perspective provoked a lengthy debate which we cannot
pretend to go over here, from Panofsky, according to whom ‘empirical visual space’ was
‘the sign of a beginning, when modern “anthropocracy” first reared itself’ (1991, pp. 71 and
72), to the constructivism of S. Edgerton (1976) or Hagen (ed.) (1980), and to the Lacanian
structuralism of H. Damisch (1987), who saw perspective as the constitution of the modern
subject.
this impasse. One can see that it was predictable that some Marxists would turn
to the critical visions of the Frankfurt School and the post-modern denunciations/
annunciations of the civilisation of illusion. Similarly, this explains why other,
traditional Marxists balked at this move, which forcibly led Marxism away from
the firm ground of historical materialism, confronting it with a society where
there were only signs, delusions and mirrors. Baudrillard’s (1968, 1970, 1972)
rhetorical work consistently involves applying a rigorously Marxist terminology
to a universe of signs, in a totalising vision of post-modern society which presents
it as a machine manipulating content-less symbols. For once, it was music that
was deployed as a surface onto which one might project a social theory: these
ideas inspired Bruits (1977), the essay which Attali threw as though it were a
hand grenade into the excessively timorous world of musicology, seeking to make
as much noise as its title suggested. Although this text deploys a very modern
language and abounds with references to rites, the body, and Girard’s sacrificial
victim,34 its argument is very traditionally Marxist (including a final few lines
on the liberation to come): Attali seeks to rewrite the history of music on the
basis of the material frame of its production, in order to realise the dream of the
Marxist tradition, finally juxtaposing analyses of the mode of production and of
the ideological signification of the works.
Through a clever reversal of the mirror relationship, ideology becomes
prophecy: music no longer exhibits the relationships of production of a given
period, but announces those of the radiant future. Escaping the nostalgia of Marxist
Cassandras, Attali forecasts the coming of a Golden Age of ‘composition’ even as
he repeats banal arguments on standardisation in the present time – we are merely
in the age of rehearsal: ‘The standardised products of today’s variety shows,
hit parades and show business, are pathetic and prophetic caricatures of future
forms of the repressive channelling of desire’ (1985, p. 6). However ingenious it
may be, this reversal does not alter in any way the relationship between art and
society: these two blocks continue to face each other, and the author’s summary
interpretation of their relationship is still arbitrary and based on a direct reading of
the one in terms of the other. He has not kept his promise to come up with a new
language: ‘Mozart and Bach reflect the bourgeoisie’s dream of harmony’ (p. 5).
Forced to accept sweeping generalisations at the expense of the close analysis of
musical works or styles, the reader has to pay a heavy price in order to gain the
right to conceive simultaneously of production and productions.35 Periodisation
34
Attali distorts Girard’s theory of a desire which only exists as mimicry of the desire
attributed to the mediator: his left-wing argument is very different. It posits on the contrary
the existence of a primary desire, which is both channelled and repressed by the capitalism
of repetition, until its eventual triumph in the renewed socialist utopia of ‘composition’. This
could not be further from the scathing critique Girard makes of revolutionary messianisms,
on the subject of Dostoyevsky, for example (1976).
35
Judgements vary according to the needs of the argument: melodic supremacy
symbolises the ‘maintenance of order’, as did harmony in the previous chapter. Whereas
(‘Sacrificing; Representing; Rehearsing; Composing’) takes us from Girard’s

notion of sacrifice and representation in the eighteenth century to the mechanisation
of disco music, before forecasting the creative advent of a radical subversion.
Evocations of contents in this historical overview are limited to remarks on their
more or less ‘complex’ or ‘tentative’ character. Although the cover of the book
declares that this work seeks to ‘understand the history of societies through the
history of their music’, music does not write this politico-economic history: it is
the author’s own conception of history which dictates what he has to say about
music. This is a conception of history where economics unsurprisingly determine
politics, until Attali retrospectively predicts the developments in politics using the
signs that he reads in music.
The success this book met with indicates that there was a gap waiting to be
filled, even if this work did not fill it: where are the works which can speak in the
same breath of art and society, avoiding the dual oppositions imposed by the stilted
tango steps performed by an erudite internal analysis, unconcerned with society,
in the arms of a social interpreter, an unscrupulous ravisher who thinks nothing
of selling off the works in order to achieve his aims? Separating this diabolical
couple implies not referring objects to their repetitive nothingness, in order to
escape the tautology of modern criticism: the authors invest the objects with their
own theory’s indifference to objects, and then accuse them of being merely vectors
of reproduction. There is absolutely no mediation: we have all the works we need
on art, or on society. A social analysis of art implies a social theory which respects
the mediation of the objects it interprets – or, and this comes down to the same
thing, an aesthetic theory which knows to what extent the art object is a mediator.
Adorno: A Negative Aesthetics, or an Impossible Mediation
There is an author who claims to be Marxist yet overcomes the opposition

between the ideological interpretation of art and the analysis of the system of its
production: T.W. Adorno. His work does not turn a blind eye to music: it seeks
throughout to give a proper account of musical works. Unlike authors close to
the Frankfurt School who were also interested in aesthetics, such as Horkheimer
or Marcuse, Adorno had no desire to produce a social critique of art. Instead, he
wished to make art into a critical social theory in action. Marcuse (1964) had made
it popular to portray liberalism as a soft form of totalitarianism, giving a sort of
Kafkaesque edge to Marxist criticism, which hoped to update its stance on culture
and modernity.36 Adorno takes this picture of the ‘administrated world’ as a self-
contemporary music expresses the conflicts of the time in passages inspired by Adorno,
there are also moments when, acting as a rhetorical foil for a populist revaluation of the
Stones or Jimi Hendrix, it evokes the trap of the inscription of art in technology.
36
In the same vein, in the aftermath of May 1968, Goldmann spoke of cultural creation
in terms of an artistic uprising against the technocracy, in the face of ’a considerable mass
evident backdrop of his work.37 What he wishes to analyse is not this background,
but art. Not in order to criticise it, but to promote it, even when it compromises and
leads to the most unresolved aporias, as an impossible cry of negative protest. Art,
for him, is to be found neither in its objects, which are all limited and caught in
the positivity of social relationships, nor in the revolutionary momentum gathered
by a particular class expressing its values. Art is this very dramatisation of its own
inability to have an autonomous existence: it is an object which says that there
are no more authentic objects, and which, as it does this, stands alone bearing
the revolutionary truth of all critique. All the rhetorical figures of Marxism are
radically inverted to reveal the radicalism of art, against any pretension to bring it
to bear on a function, ideology, or usage: ‘art works fall helplessly mute before …
the reproach that they are actually pointless’ (2004, p. 160).
An odd mix of modernity and aristocratism, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is a
monolith on a vaster scale than any other, a great philosophical fresco which might
have been painted by a Hegel who had decided to write in black ink only. In this
book, Adorno has the merit of revelling in his extremism and of never giving
in to the bleak rationalisations of revolutionary, populist or conservative Marxist
academisms. According to him, art must be salvaged against all opposition – and
his aesthetic theory may help to save it. He buries all capitalist merchants, the united
bureaucrats of every country, and all reductive economists under his haughtily
contemptuous aesthetic criticism. His posture is not lacking in greatness. It is not
up to social theory to decipher the difficult relationship of art and society, but up to
art to speak its truth. It is clear, then, that far from taking an interest in mediation,
Adorno is the thinker who formulates the refusal of any form of mediation.38
Adorno’s radical position almost leads to solipsism with its repeated assertion, on
the one hand, that art is the locus of a truth that is absolute but always negative,
and, on the other, that there is a totalitarian lie in any form of social positivity:
from Tesco or Walmarts to ministries, all the promoters of culture are related to the
utilitarianism and mercantilism of a social function. Culture is the very negation of
art understood as a gesture that is critical, absolute and impossible.
of individuals … who are totally passive, and a small group of technocrats … who tend to
monopolise all decisions’ (1977, p. 45).
37
Painting this devastating, but more rhetorical than analytical, picture made Adorno
famous in the United States, where his best-known work is The Dialectic of Enlightenment
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1944/1997), which contains a notorious and rather non-dialectical
denunciation of the ‘Culture industry’ (pp. 120–67). Evoking this industry in fiery tones that
make his disgust plain, he suggests that it seeks uniformity, is motivated by an insane desire
to make the world rational, allows technology to take over, globalises cultural production,
values impact over everything else, and stages the ‘ritual … of Tantalus’ (p. 111). The
opposition he draws between art and culture could not be less mediated: ‘Works of art are
ascetic and shameless; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish’ (ibid.).
38
P.-M. Menger also makes this point clearly in his bibliographical analysis of the
sociology of music (1983, pp. 12–18).
The work reaches its lowest points in those moments when Adorno irrevocably
condemns the genres he does not like, such as jazz, not to mention film music
(Adorno and Eisler 1947) or radio music (1945): ‘The whole realm of musical
performance has always had the social stigma of a service for those who can
pay … the prominent composer of today who, under the pretext of motion-picture
requirements, willingly or unwillingly debases his music earns money, but not a
place in history’ (Adorno and Eisler 1947, pp. 46–9). The process by which Adorno
elects some works and not others is totally arbitrary: a priori excluded from art,
these genres have no right to the absolution which on the contrary brings salvation
from their inevitable compromises to the works that Adorno recognises as art. The
absolution and absolute character of the works depends on this recognition alone.
Refusing to deploy his virtuoso analytical skills to examine popular, commercial
or cultural genres, the philosopher expedites them quickly by considering them
through the lens of the most external categories which may be applied to them,
when he does not simply give free rein to the hatred which he feels for anything
that has anything like mass appeal. ‘The culture industry calls its crack performers
by their first name, just as head waiters and hairdressers chummily refer to the jet
set’ (2004, p. 329). Jazz is not condemned for being bad music, but for the poor
dialectics of its masochistic acceptance of eternal repetition.39
Adorno fascinated a generation of sociologists of art, before being cast as a
monster to be destroyed. He had courted this fate with his provocative ‘all or
nothing’ stance: his radical critique was soon denounced as an odious and
reactionary defence of the elite, and the masses (students of the philosophy of
art and a few researchers …) rejected him, confirming his beliefs. It may be
more profitable to benefit from the power of his thought in order to enhance our
understanding of the problems he tackled, bypassing his apocalyptic views on
what he believed to be sub-art – or, worse still, cultural production – in order to
concentrate on those of his writings where his love of art and his intransigence led
him to make the works speak at an unprecedented level. Rather than looking at
the (dizzying) circular formulations which power the virtuoso negative dialectics
of his Aesthetic Theory (1984–2004), let us turn to his Mahler (1996) to seek the
fruits of a project that was unique, and almost mad: accounting for a work of art
and its social truth with the same vocabulary. Adorno did not seek to achieve
this by keeping track of the mediations which lead from the one to the other, but
by locating the criteria of the social value of art a priori in its refusal to conform
to a social role. Non-mediation becomes the only mediation which the critical
39
Because, for jazz, ‘nothing may exist which is not like the world as it is’…
(1967/1983, pp. 123 and 132). Blacks imitate their white masters by performing the role
which the latter have allocated them: reducing art to the intention of a subject, Adorno
gives in to the same psychologism which he excoriates elsewhere, seemingly unperturbed
to invoke this as an argument if it allows him to explain what he has decreed to be a
non-music.
author grants to authentic art.40 Adorno does not hesitate to project this prohibition
onto Mahler’s music itself: ‘The smoothing, harmonising process of mediation is
disdained’ (p. 78) in his music.
Adorno allows himself to take one single liberty: to open out the scores of
Mahler’s symphonies.41 Instead of reading their music, like musicians who scan
them for chords, modulations and orchestral effects (their ‘technique’ (p. 3)), or of
hearing spring flowers or Sturm und Drang evoked by external commentaries (on
their ‘imaginative content’ (p. 3)), he sees them as expressing a dialectical struggle
between ‘expression’ and the ‘expressed’, form and content, ‘the music’s structural
elements’ and ‘the glowing expressive intentions’ (pp. 3 and 4).42 Although others
had set themselves the same programme, few tried to realise it. Considering the
challenge ‘which music generally presents to thought, and even to philosophical
thought’ (p. 3), the paradoxical success of Adorno’s work is due, I think, to the
fact that it adopts a position on mediation which is precisely the reverse of the
stance which it so masterfully describes. In theory, Adorno wishes for an objective
aesthetics. He refuses to adopt the ‘The Man, his Life and Works’ approach: if the
work is to have an absolute meaning, this cannot be dependent on biographical
anecdotes or on the psychology of the artists.43 Instead, the composer’s work
is to be grasped in the cry which he extracts from reified objects, making them
speak: ‘He did not legitimise himself in the slightest by deriving productivity
from the defect itself’ (p. 25). It is this very powerlessness that the work allows
us to understand: ‘Those who peruse art solely with comprehension make it into
something straightforward, which is furthest from what it is … Of all the arts,
music is the prototypical example of this: it is at once completely enigmatic
and totally evident’ (2004, p. 162). Adorno focuses on the work, then, but not
on the comprehensiveness of its reified technical structure. Instead, he examines
its ‘brokenness’ (1996, p. 24),44 its ‘wound’ (p. 25), its throb, its impossible
movement – a movement which, in Mahler’s works, indefinitely watches its own
progress and interruptions. However, this lack does not refer to what lies outside
the work, the positive elements of which may only serve to project its ‘shadow
of negativity’ (ibid.). Instead, this lack can only be articulated through the work,
where it is ‘manifested objectively in the musical idiom and forms’ (ibid.). Evoking
40
Cf. infra, p. 149, n. 37, the quotation from M.I. Makarius (1975).
41
The endnotes of the book are almost exclusively composed of references to the bar
numbers of the works under discussion.
42
This thesis was already present in his first writings; cf. ‘Music and Language: A
Fragment’ (1992, pp. 1–8): the relationship between form and content is all there is to seek
in music, their problematic encounter defining the content of the work.
43
Nor on their psychoanalysis; Adorno praises Freud, a ‘German-Bohemian Jew like
Mahler (who on) encounter(ing) the latter at a critical point in his life declined to cure his
person out of respect for his work, and so showed himself entirely superior to those of his
followers who dispose of Baudelaire by diagnosing his mother complex’ (p. 39).
44
‘His special tone (is) that of brokenness’ (1996, p. 32).
breaches, collapses, suspensions, breakthroughs, fulfilment, Adorno customises

the terminology he uses to speak of Mahler: these ‘characters’ – in the sense of
Leibnitz’s conceptual alphabet45 – echo the tension between the material and the
idea in Mahler’s works. Although all the words pertaining to musical technique
initially elicit such tensions (think of ‘turns’, ‘slides’, ‘appoggiature and shakes’
(from Italian appoggiare, to lean), ‘retardations’, ‘escape tones’, etc.), they lose this
capacity to express those tensions once they have been absorbed as mere technical
words into the grammar of analysts. The art work, according to Adorno, gives
form to the impossibility of form. This is the only resource which his ‘negative
dialectics’ will grant to the idea of ‘endowing music with speech through theory’
(p. 44). On my left, then, is the way of the world, and on my right, the course of the
work. Between them lies the impossible, functional, positive reconciliation that a
successful mediation would constitute. The only option left is a negative dialectic
of understanding, a sort of expression which turns the impossibility of expression
into a vector for expression: ‘It is music’s nature to overreach itself’ (p. 6).
Adorno deploys this single resource through an accumulation of characteristic
formulations. Once noted, this stratagem becomes wearisome.46 It can sometimes
veer into ridicule: ‘When two French horns melodiously annotate the phrase, the
precarious artistic moment reconciles the irreconcilable’ (p. 8). When he evokes
the social, Adorno recycles the Manichean terminology which he deployed in In
Search of Wagner,47 a work teeming with unhappy Hegelian consciences pursuing
idealists, bourgeois and bureaucrats. Thus, one learns that ‘the partly prebourgeois
feudal, partly josephinistically skeptical Austrian air, untouched by German
idealism’ gave Mahler the ‘potential’ to ‘take … issue with extensive life, plunge …
with closed eyes into time, yet without installing life as a substitute metaphysics’
45
In his third chapter, ‘Characters’, Mahler makes an explicit reference to the
‘characteristica universalis’ (p. 47) in order to explain his own ‘material theory of forms’
(p. 45). This notion had therefore evolved significantly since he first invoked it in In
Search of Wagner (2005) where the work ‘character’ announced a psycho-sociological
interpretation of Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Portrayed as the incarnation of the threatened
clerical class, Wagner was seen as a sado-masochistic tyrant all the more cruelly set against
his victims that he recognised himself in them.
46
Let us quote a single example of this acute case of ‘dialectitis’: ‘Where it [Mahler’s
music] overtaxes itself, it expresses the possibility of the world that the world refuses, for
which there are no words in the world’s language; this truest of all things is discredited as
the world’s untruthfulness’ (p. 69).
47
Although it was published in German at the same time as Mahler, In Search of
Wagner was written 20 years earlier, in 1937–38. In this work, Adorno constantly resorts
to dialectics to turn weakness into greatness, and vice versa. Hence these lines on ‘the
critical consciousness that Wagner’s grandiose weakness acquires in his commerce with
the unconscious forces responsible for his own decadence. As he falls, he gains possession
of himself. His consciousness is schooled in the night that threatens to overwhelm
consciousness. The imperialist dreams of the catastrophic end of imperialism’ (2005,
pp. 143–4).
(p. 64), and allowed him to ‘track … down meaning in its absence, its absence in
meaning’ (p. 32). Could it be that, excessively reliant on chiasmus and oxymoron,
the theoretical apparatus of the great thinker merely rehearses the dialectical
interplay of the impossibility of the possible and the possibility of the impossible,
which supposedly – and tragically – tears the work apart? If so, one might be
forgiven for putting the book down at this point and deeming it a failure. Yet, as
one puts down the book down one nevertheless cannot help thinking of Mahler’s
desperate farandoles, with their ‘aimlessly circling, irresistible movements’ (p. 6),
impotent echoes and panics (these words are from the book). And one cannot help
feeling that no one has ever come so close to what it is that touches us in music. Is
it possible to account for this feeling? Yes, and this will be our reading hypothesis,
but reading against the grain of Adorno’s own dialectical system of interpretation.
Adorno says that the work is all he wishes to see. Yet, his book abounds with
innumerable social, personal, aesthetic and historical references, as well as with
allusions to Mahler’s milieu, century, and nationality, as well as to his Jewish
origins, Germany and its overbearing power, the Wagnerian model which he
borrows only to destroy it from the inside, contemporary novels, the state of the
tonal system, Bruckner, and the popular tunes and military brass bands which
he heard in the streets of Vienna. Technically, his writing style is saturated with
metaphors: these are the only rhetorical figures capable of capturing not the object
(or the subjective meaning) of the music, but its movement, the way in which it
circulates between sounds, which are nothing, and us, who invest so much in them.
Yes, the aesthetic theory of the object which frames the book is rather overbearing.
And what really lies behind this theory – as with Hegel – is really an all-powerful
subject: a composer somehow endowed with a mysterious superhuman power
which allows him to transfigure all the obstacles on his path. And then, there is
also this philosopher, who standing alone against all the merchants, is able to tell
the story of this exploit. However, we are under no obligation to take Adorno’s
word for what he does: although he officially wagers that a work is absolutely
objective and irreducible to all its mediations, and unofficially places his bet on
the thinking subject who confronts it, all that holds his text together are its closely
interwoven intermediary threads. Under cover of writing an unflinching aesthetic
analysis of the object, he was led by remorse or a Freudian slip – we do not know
which – to produce, as it were under the counter, the most subtle of sociologies
of perception. What such a reading of Adorno’s book suggests, in short, is that
he systematically does the opposite to what he claims to be doing throughout the
work. Far from balking at such an interpretation, I tend to suspect that dialectics
always serve that purpose.
Adorno pushes Hegelian thought to its very limits. Adorno severs the mediation
between the subject and the object, when Hegel had already reduced it to a long
and laborious, but abstract and passive, formality for salvation, a necessary detour
through the world.48 He keeps repeating that things are not what they are, that there
is nothing to be found either on the side of firm objects or on the side of the subject,
that there is nobody underlying the intention who might wish for something, no
neurosis which might allow us to decipher the composer’s works. In spite of what
he says, however, he does not leave a great impossible void between the object and
the subject which only dialectical intricacies might manage to bring together without
bringing them together, in ‘a precarious artistic moment’ (p. 8). With consummate
literary skill, he deploys the multiple opacities of a long and heterogeneous series of
mediations. These mediations constitute the hidden resources of the text. When one
reads the book in this light, it seems – contrary to what Adorno claims – that there is
no mediation he does not resort to. These mediations operate freely, at all levels, and
outside any empirical control, crisscrossing with virtuosity, their status consistently
emancipated from any theoretical investigation. Without justification, they borrow
shamelessly from the political sociology of the day, from an analysis of taste,
from all the musical material Mahler could draw on, from the great philosophies
which have interpreted modern art, from the many biographical or psychological
comments which his contemporaries made, from Mahler’s letters, from books
devoted to the composer, and, with clearer continuity (but no more justification),
from two systematic resources:
• Adorno’s first resource is his writing style, the alter ego which enfolds the
work rather than repeating it, and gives it its meaning by giving it another
name. This extremely skilfully deployed writing style is never mentioned,
even though it has a decisive impact on the allocation of meaning and
is a constant feature of the book, which is everywhere woven through
with whirling, repetitive phrases which seem to imitate the way in which
Mahler’s own phraseology simultaneously rolls out and observes its own
deficiencies. Our heads ring with this music which collapses in panic,
resounding with the bell on the cap of the backward-looking, pussy-footing
joker who is constantly being called to order, but disintegrates in pieces,
in ‘gigantic symphonic potpourris’ (p. 34),49 in unpleasant whistling and
acid sonorities which suddenly yield to a tone of frantic wildness … These
phrases are all taken from the book. Is this really about making music speak
through ‘a material theory of form’ (p. 44 and 45), or is Adorno taking
48
This mediation fills his Aesthetic Theory – it a burden imposed upon humankind
in this world, which the Aufklärung will allow to transcend: ‘What the enigmaticalness of
art works refers to can only be thought mediately. The objection to the phenomenology of
art … is not that it is antiempirical but, on the contrary, that it brings thinking experience
to a halt’ (2004, p. 162); ‘The art work becomes objective as something made through and
through, that is, by virtue of the subjective mediation of all its elements’ (p. 221).
49
Adorno endorsed these words as unwittingly truthful, despite the fact that
Schoenberg attributed them to a famous critic of Mahler’s symphonies, arguing that he
coined this phrase in order to mock his philistinism (1975, p. 462).
advantage of the heterogeneity of both media in order to generate meaning

by translating the one into the other, while systematically (but unavowedly)
resorting to a technique based on metaphorical evocation? If this is so, the
theoretical element which is absent from this montage, which is in practice
omnipresent is the receptor, in whose mind these linguistic figures provoke
recollections – that is to say, not so much the memory of what has been,
but a retrospective understanding of the work by memories which ‘glow
with a reflected joy that was never present’ (p. 47) (as Adorno himself
says, speaking of the traditional enclaves which persisted at the heart of
industrial Europe) …
• Adorno’s second resource, no less semantically productive, simply stems
from his total identification with the composer. The latent, and constant,
subject of the book is Adorno himself, a German Jew operating at the
centre of classical German philosophy, and tormented by his adhesion to
and rejection of both Germany and classicism, that is by all the positive
elements of his identity: ‘one of the facets of his language … is added …
from the ruins of a collective either outmoded or unattainable’ (p. 34).
Who is the book about? Is it about Mahler the Jew whose works evoke a
doubting Wagner, or is it about Adorno, a philosopher perpexedly standing
at the heart of German philosophy? And do we have to choose between
them? Do we have to discard the illusion of philosophical enlightenment in
favour of psychological projection? No. If one takes the question of taste
seriously, Adorno has put his own case into words, identifying as a music-
lover with the work of an artist. There is nothing psychological about the
result. It gives a comprehensive, but isolated – it is only one man’s – answer
to a very serious question, which is decisive for the sociology of culture:
why does one man love another man’s music? The disciplinary mechanics
which establish distinctions between complementary and partial causalities
are the reason explanations have been so unconvincing to date: how could
a heavy-handed perspective on distinctive consumption not overshadow
the infinite variety of artistic tastes? How could one be satisfied with
psychological analyses which are incapable of establishing qualitative
distinctions between works, which have been transformed into bundles of
symbols? What do biographies matter to us when they present artists as
heroes, playing with mythical projections? And does the well-established
scholarship of art history or music theory tell us anything about the actual
meeting of the music-lover and the work? There are no mediations to be
found, only causes condemned to powerlessness by their very pretension
to be causes. Like Mahler’s musical language, or Adorno’s metaphors,
determinations are only effective if they allow two realities to write and
interpret each other: they are neither external causes, nor the choices made
by a transcendental subject.
However, almost in spite of himself, Adorno gives us an insight into this encounter
between a creator and a musician in his unique aesthetic novel. Instead of
mechanically piling on top of each other, or competing to see which one is the
most determining, the mediations which operate the transition from the subject
of taste to the work of art are deployed by a novelistic writing style which gives
them their active, open character. This leads us as far away from the primacy
of the work as it does from the determinism of the social subject. To argue that
Adorno loved Mahler because, like him, Mahler was Jewish is not to destroy a
reading of Adorno’s Mahler as a purely aesthetic work. Adorno loved Mahler as
he constituted him as a Jew through his works, and as he constituted himself as a
Jew through his interpretation of Mahler’s music, while, in turn, this interpretation
itself gave him a definition of Jewishness … He also defined his and Mahler’s
aesthetics through each other, and proceeded the same way with his philosophy
and his analytical approach to Mahler’s works. Rather than being dialectical, his
definitions are interwoven around the notion that an Other hides at the heart of the
Same, insinuating doubt in the most certain of objects, and inducing the fear that
the civilised might suddenly turn into a horrific creature. Without explaining their
interconnection, his analyses thus move from metaphorical renditions of Mahler’s
symphonies to the stands that critical theory must constantly take: the suspicion
that horror lies in wait, very close by, behind the peaceful mask of culture.50 The
Nazis were no less German than any others. Believing in the course of the world is
not possible. In the same way, Mahler’s musical material does not believe in itself.
Adorno insists on this in his accounts of its character: ‘Mahler speaks in indirect
discourse’ (p. 29), using ‘invisible quotation marks’ (p. 32). He is like ‘A foreigner
[who] speaks music fluently, but with an accent’ (ibid.), until, two pages later, this
assertion calls forth a formulation which explicitly articulates the terms of the
identification which we have posited between Adorno and Mahler: ‘That the Jew
Mahler scented Fascism decades ahead …’ (p. 34).
The book therefore also owes its success to Mahler’s music, which always
introduces a critical distance from itself. Adorno keeps representing its seesawing
movement, as it goes back and forth between being a music which can be followed
from the inside, to a music which seems to unroll from the outside, as though a
stranger to itself. Far from proposing a psychologistic interpretation referring us
back to an arbitrary subjectivity, the reciprocal projections in Adorno’s Mahler51
suggest the infinite number of mediations – from the most visible, social, and
objectified, to the most intimate, personal, and secret – which are necessary in
order to explain from the outside, or experience from the inside, the relationship
between a man and an artist’s work. As he rehabilitated Mahler, who was rather out
50
In Adorno’s words, it is Mahler’s music itself that fears: ’in the collapses there
is enacted what the musical process fears’ (p. 45); on the next page, he also speaks of ‘a
premonition of unaltered, savage times’ (p. 46).
51
More than once, a slip of the tongue has led me to confuse their two names when
giving oral presentations on this book …
of favour among progressive artists (the only ones he had previously promoted),
Adorno went straight to the heart of the theory of mediation. At odds with both the
philosophy of the object and its critical opposite, what the book – or is it Mahler’s
music? – repeats indefinitely is that there is no utterance without enunciation, as
pragmatics would later argue.
It is doubtlessly a rather bold move to transform a highly proficient book on
the aesthetics of creation into a work exhibiting its author’s spontaneous self-
analysis, and to turn Adorno – who hated cultural mediation on the grounds that its
‘smoothing, harmonising process’ (p. 78) exhibited the attempt of the bourgeoisie
to bandage the wounds of the world – into a passive witness being enacted by his
own statement rather than producing it, this statement unwillingly exhibiting with
exceptional focal clarity the mutual construction of the art work by the aesthete
and of the aesthete by the art work. Nothing is finished yet, of course. We still
have to throw light – while also explaining the modalities of their efficiency – on
the mediations which Adorno always hated but mobilised here, helter-skelter and
without mentioning them: the psychology of the subject, the sociology of taste, the
sociography of social determinisms, the meaningful intention of the creator, the
mechanisms of the identification between author and receptor, etc.
Nevertheless, Adorno’s radical theoretical rejection of all mediations brought
the contradiction at the heart of discourses on art and society to a paroxysm.
Although most of these discourses have no theoretical objection to mediation,
in practice they are quick to settle on a cause. Having found their explanatory
principle, the only mediations they highlight are weak, rigid, or rough. These may
constitute a screen for their projections or an arbitrary point of view, in the case of
the sociologies which read the works directly, or a particular factor may be singled
out and transformed into an instrumental cause, as in the case of the sociologies
of institutions, markets, or professions. As for Marxists, all that matters to them is
to establish connections at any price between the raft of art and the solid ground
of society. Adorno casts off the theoretical moorings of art, while dialectically
asserting that this casting off constitutes the social character of art. Although he
denounces mediation in theory, he nevertheless simultaneously provides the best
example of it with this book. I wish to read his book as a practical introduction
to mediation: not as a toolbox which might allow us roughly to connect art and
society, but as a work which subtly follows through the incarnated, heterogeneous,
and restrictive paths which, as they pass through people and things, allow art to be
actively constituted by society and society by art.
Chapter 3
Sociology and the Art Object:
Belief, Illusion, Artefacts
These watchful dragons are there to warn you, the audience, how you must enjoy
yourselves, and to direct you, musicians, painters and poets, on the stage. Kiss
their hands, they are the viziers of the audience, the ministers of their anger and the
guardian of art’s honour. … Even when they wound you, they reveal to the world
that you are alive.
E. Delacroix, Des critiques en matière d’art, 1829
Adorno’s stance was an isolated case: the complexity of his position meant that
he was rejected either for being a Marxist reductionist, or for being a vigorously
anti-sociologistic aesthete. He was both. Although the path which he explored
probably led to a dead end, he did show that it was possible to come up with
original solutions to the question of the relationship between art and society,
and that one did not have to make a sterile choice between autonomy and
submission. His anti-empirical stance is more disturbing: although his approach
is powerful, Adorno’s reworking of ideas inherited from art history validate and
so reinforce all the categories that art had produced – such as the notions of
work, author, autonomy and radicalism. It is easy to see why sociology kept
him at arm’s length: its position is exactly the reverse of Adorno’s. Unconcerned
with respecting the privileges which art claims for itself, sociology is keen to
criticise artistic categories and show what they exclude. Indeed, the logic of
sociological analysis is often very close to the simple denegation of art. Although
Adorno was supremely indifferent to real mediators, he nonetheless reinvented
a higher form of mediation found in the work itself. Whereas sociological texts
constantly highlight the mediators of art, it is always with the intention of pitting
them against the idea that art works could be powerful in their own right. As
we shall see, what best characterises and gives its coherence to the sociological
position on art is the theme of belief, which was probably the approach to art
to which Adorno was most viscerally allergic. Conversely – and this cannot
be said of Adorno – with sociology, countless new factors (norms, institution,
organisation, milieu, network, professions, collaborators, gate-keepers,
conventions, amateurs, etc.) can be brought to bear on new analyses of art: this
is the great advantage of empirical approaches.
The Theory of Belief
Even when the debate has been settled between Marxist reductionism and the
social readings of art which make it say what they want to hear, the question
which sociology puts to art continues to appear profoundly unsettling. The bad
relations between art and sociology have often been noted. Thus, R. Moulin
writes that ‘Sociology … is seen as a sacrilegious and profanatory project’ (1967,
p. 12). Similarly, Bourdieu declares that ‘Sociology and art do not make good
bedfellows’ (1993b, p. 139). The theory of belief is central to this predicament:
a tool explaining the negative reactions actors have to the light which sociology
throws on art, it also allows us to distinguish between what this disclosure reveals
and the mere denunciation of art as a deception performed by ‘non-believers’. The
theory of belief avoids the twin traps of negating or endorsing art by returning
to Durkheim’s stance towards cultural objects and to the beliefs of indigenous
people. The theory of belief is neither about being seduced by the work, nor
about denouncing the snobbery or the credulity of admirers who are blind to the
emptiness of what they admire (i.e. the first-degree endorsement or refusal of
art). Neither is it about reading society through art or art through society (i.e. the
second-degree stances of aesthetist/sociologistic discourses, which are devoid of
mediations, and yield straightforward interpretations pitting art against society).
What is at stake is the need to achieve a social analysis of a relationship which
produces both the art object and its admirer. The sociology of art is born of this
Durkheimian leap, which disrupts the immediate relationship between the art
work and the amateur. The theory of belief was to become the greatest common
denominator in sociology, because it allowed critics to evade the obstacle that the
object represents, and to reject both the direct determination of the work by society
and a direct reading of society through the work: ‘The universe of art is a universe
of belief’ (Bourdieu 1993b, p. 139).
The sociologist’s mediation becomes a tool for disclosure, which follows
its own very particular path. It proceeds very differently from both the Marxist
reduction of art to the ideological or commercial interests of a class, and the
deciphering of art works in terms of the imaginary. Instead the sociologist’s
mediation denounces belief through the introduction of a mediator. However
such mediation is defined according to different authors (social distinction, shared
conventions, institutional legitimacy, and so on), it is the vector of a determination
which in reality constitutes those who hold beliefs and think themselves free to
hold them. The first (and often the only) step that the sociology of art takes is
to introduce a disruption. Art is torn away from the fascination which allows
direct communication between the believer and the object of his belief. Placing
an intermediary screen between them allows the magnificent autonomy of that
privileged relationship to be related to what really determines it. This is no longer
achieved by brutally removing this relationship from belief, as the rationalists
used to do, but, more subtly, by showing it to be merely belief, in line with a
Sociology and the Art Object: Belief, Illusion, Artefacts 71
sociological tradition where Durkheim is as closely related to Bourdieu as he is to

Becker or Moulin.
Hence the importance of Durkheim, who founded sociology on a positive
model of belief. Hence also the importance of Bourdieu, who developed its modern
version, at the risk of provoking either the hostility or the approval of his readers,
depending on their own specific beliefs: since the happy days of Durkheim’s era,
this model had become complex, critical and negative, because believers were
now understood to dwell among us, as opposed to being seen as people who
prostrated themselves in front of wooden objects in the forests of the Southern
hemisphere. While Bourdieu adopted it openly, the sociologistic approach to art
was often deployed more implicitly by sociologists, via automatic borrowings
from the lexicon of belief as soon as they touched on art. Take H.S. Becker, for
example, an author whom I have deliberately chosen because belief is not central
to his argument: ‘As participants of one sort or another in all these art worlds, we
necessarily share the beliefs on which collective action in them is based’ (1982,
p. 365) The omnipresence of belief was also clear in the previous quotation from
Moulin. As is characteristic of the stance she adopts, Moulin shows solidarity
both with sociologists faced with the first-degree resistance which artists oppose
to their research, and with artists confronted by the anti-aesthetic pretensions
of sociologists. Although her language is deliberately religious (‘sacrilegeous’,
‘profanatory’), she also keeps this register under control: it is believers who think
that sociology attacks their beliefs.
Bourdieu’s Lesson
Critical sociology naturally turned to the most beautiful of objects. At odds with
sociological approaches which ignore the specific mediations of a ‘field’1 and
denounce a belief only to relate it to fixed social determinations, Bourdieu began
by saturating his field of study with mediations in order to challenge the direct
confrontation of subject and object.2 He then took on first-degree believers3 by
pointing to the relative autonomy of these fields, as well as to the illusory character
1
‘[M]ilitant unbelief can be just an inversion of belief’ (2010, p. 5).
2
He also ‘aims to transcend’ many other antinomies, such as those between
‘determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious
and the individual and society’ which yield ‘things without history’ and ‘subjects “without
inertia”’ (1990b, pp. 55–6). His solution is to interpose the habitus and the field between
the subject and the object, in order to make ‘unthought presuppositions’ (p. 36) objective
and explain their miraculous adjustment ‘“without violence, art or argument”’ (p. 56), as
Pascal put it.
3
As well as their ‘interested, practical knowledge’: ‘those who are part of it tend
to make belonging the necessary and sufficient condition of adequate knowledge’ (2010,
pp. 3–4). Evoking ‘the alternative between the partial and the impartial, between the
interested and partisan insider and the neutral and objective outsider, between the compliant
of their object, in the strong sense of the term, and to the miscrecognition needed
for the production of realities. He finally challenged them by emphasising the
sociologist’s ability to objectify a general grammar of fields, understood as ‘the
production of belief’ (1980), and this led him to theorise the social in terms of this
very misrecognition.4 Art made this strikingly clear: its demands for autonomy are
the most aggressive, and the love that it bestows upon its chosen object strenuously
denies that it has itself chosen this object.
Invoking Weber, Bourdieu reintegrated the actors’ values into the questions
under scrutiny, rather than disqualifying them – as a common rationalist might
have done – before adapting his theory of belief to different fields. Reinstating the
self-fulfilling effects of any form of delegation5 led him to highlight the necessity of
denial and its causal power: it is this denial that reverses the terms of the delegation,
giving power to delegates over those who empower them.6 It seems to me that
this vision of the world as an empire built on a series of delegations which have
been sealed and naturalised by denial offers us a glimpse of Bourdieu at his best.
However, at this precise point, Bourdieu’s argument takes a turn, shifting from an
emphasis on the relative autonomy of the field to the relativity of that autonomy,
as the voice of the sociologist reasserts itself. The artist’s ‘grace’, the ‘ministry’ of
politics, the ‘consecration’ of the scholar, the cultural ‘salvation’ of the elite: his
systematic use of religious vocabulary (and Latin) seamlessly transforms his theory
into a denunciation of all forms of delegation, exposing them as so many forms
of betrayal. Although political representation7 is what these metaphors target most
vigorously, they nevertheless shed as much light on the arbitrary domination that
accompanies cultural self-consecration,8 as well as on the circular recognition of
scholars by scholars (1984b) and, of course, of artists by artists: light must be shed
on ‘the economic and social conditions underlying the establishment of an artistic
field founded upon a belief in the quasi-magical powers attributed to the modern
artist’ (1993a, p. 259) As the religio became ‘social magic’, the self-generating
(if not conniving) view and the reductive vision’ (ibid., p. 5) he pitted all his adversaries
against each other, only to see every one of them confuse him for his opponent ….
4
For a more detailed account of this argument, see Hennion (2010b).
5
It has the ‘power to produce existence by producing the collectively recognised, and
thus realised, representation of existence’ (1991a, p. 42).
6
On the ‘oracle effect’ which affects all mediators, see the words that Bourdieu puts
in the delegate’s mouth: ‘I am nothing but the delegate of God or the People, but that in
whose name I speak is everything, and on this account I am everything’ (1991a, p. 211).
7
On this subject, he notes ‘The usurpation which is always potentially present in
delegation’ (1991a, p. 219); similarly, he describes the ‘self-consecration of the delegate’
(ibid., p. 210) as ‘usurpatory ventriloquism’ (ibid., p. 211).
8
Bourdieu develops this religious metaphor throughout The Love of Art (1991),
where art lovers seek ‘a monopoly of the manipulation of cultural goods and the
institutional signs of cultural salvation’ (1991b, p. 113), preferring to abandon ‘the
fortunes of cultural salvation to the inexplicable vagaries of grace, or to the arbitrary
distribution of “gifts”’ (p. 4).
illusio which gives the delegate his power, turned into usurpatio. Having initially
filled the world with mediations which were so many hurdles lurking between
the subject and the object, Bourdieu expels them even more radically than would
do first-degree denunciations, which were always made in the name of some
competing reality: now that Bourdieu has illuminated the self-fulfilling character
of the chain of delegations and denegations, nothing can resist the revelation of the
arbitrariness of all reality, this revelation having itself become the only scientific
principle. A glass cathedral built on wind, the world floats motionlessly while its
subjects – each standing on the small corner they have chosen for themselves –
imagine they can recognise their being in the whirlwind of ever-changing images
projected onto its walls.
This masterful anti-Kantian philosophy derives its power from the
attractiveness of its critical spiral. However, the autonomy which it initially
granted to the constructions of actors in a given field now appears derisory. It
radicalises Durkheim’s division of the world into natural objects and arbitrary
signs, and removes any residual positivity from the signified dimension of the
sign, that is to say the invisible society in Durkheim’s thought. Such a positive
social reality is still far too real for Bourdieu. Far from producing something
real by composing with nature and society, actors merely inflate an enormous
collective illusion which the sociologist may deflate at any time, by piercing
its envelope. As with Durkheim, hybrids are not allowed to resist analysis
because they have no ontological status: either they pertain to nature and elude
sociology, or they pertain to the social and are merely delusions. While one
must acknowledge the more empirical work Bourdieu does in the first phase
of his demonstration, where he needs to restore the mediations which are
useful to him, it is important to throw light onto the blind spots hidden by the
template which he applies to artistic reality in order to decode it. The sociologist
deconstructs the collective work involved in the production of the art object in
order to subject it to a levelling. In the process, Bourdieu chooses his adversary:
this critical levelling contrasts in every way with the efforts of disciplines which
place themselves at the service of the art object.9 He tries to undermine the
aestheticism of philosophers of the object, scholars and art lovers. He dares to
bring their claim to attain the sublime back down to the prosaic in a language
which has the Oedipal overtones of an attempt to murder the Father. Hence his
fascination with his own iconoclasm. Hence also the exaggerated claim he makes
to being incapable of recognising beauty: which is, however, yet another way of
complying with the prohibition banning close approach to the Holy of Holies,
i.e. the work ‘itself’. Sociology battles with aesthetics, only to reinforce it. It
has not yet managed to give a proper account of art because it is still locked in a
struggle between stances which are mirror images of each other. Becker presents
9
This is the metaphor which springs from Gombrich’s pen when he evokes the
relationship between the various disciplines which examine art in ‘Art History and the
Social Sciences’ (1979, p. 132).
a more decisive example for this question than Bourdieu: whereas Bourdieu’s
project could not be more explicitly anti-aesthetic10 and deploys the theory of
belief in order to denounce aestheticism, Becker presents himself as respectful
of the meaning which actors give to their objects. At the outset, Becker declares
that he will not give special consideration to art, but will be ‘treating art as not
so very different from other kinds of work’ (1982, pp. ix–x). His prosaic take on
art is clear, then. But in which perspective is art not so different? It goes without
saying,11 according to Becker, that it is not so very different as believers, those
fierce defenders of the essential difference of art, believe it is. The fact that this
refusal to treat art differently is taken for granted, provokes the suspicion that
sociology has not solved the question of the relationship of sociologistic and
aesthetic discourses: the Father’s presence silently haunts a discourse whose
very existence depends on opposing him, and which therefore remains indebted
to his propositions, even – and especially – when it systematically inverts them.
The active principle of sociologisation is still at work in Becker’s very liberal
take on sociology, which denounces art by transforming it into a belief.
This explains why the sophisticated connivance of discourses which put the
art object on a pedestal – and which the sociological perspective denounces as
complacent and redundant – remains opposed to the proudly proclaimed crassness
of analyses with a sociological bent, which proclaim the right to reinsert art into
social relations and denounce a practice which does not speak of its selective
nature, while renouncing more or less nostalgically the rhetorical benefits yielded
by the subtleties of internal analyses of art works. The terms of this opposition
predated Bourdieu in Anglo-American social history.12 However, it is Bourdieu
who gave this renunciation an exalted status by turning it into a duty, and by
representing the sociologist as an ascetic standing alone against everyone else
when he loudly proclaimed his right to counter the erudition of aesthetes with
‘vulgarity’.13 Thinking itself under attack, art history would sometimes regress
back to a virulently anti-sociologistic stance. Yet, covered by its self-declared
allegiance to aesthetics and liberated from the tyranny of the object, art history
in fact is making devastating raids on the mediators of art and is more prone to
stray from the straight and narrow than sociology, obsessed as it is with knocking
the artistic object off its pedestal. This ambiguity means that work is needed in
order to move away from the denunciation of art, go beyond the model of belief,
and set out the possible terms of another sociology, one which moves away from
denunciation by taking denunciation itself as its object, instead of using as a tool.
10
Cf. his famous ‘Postscript’ on Kant in Distinction (1984a, pp. 484–502).
11
This is probably what V.L. Zolberg is getting at when she notes Becker’s ‘scepticism’
(i.e. inversion of belief) and ‘populist biases’ (1990, p. 155, note 13).
12
Cf. the condescension with which Gombrich (1963, pp. 86–94) dismisses
A. Hauser’s book (1951): ‘(That) is simply too primitive to stand the test of historical
observation’ (p. 90).
13
Cf. the title of his Postscript: ‘Towards a “Vulgar” Critique of “Pure” Critiques.’
Any struggle supposes a level of complicity with the opponent being fought
against. The time has come to pacify the social sciences – not by refusing to engage
in this debate, but by moving on from using a non-problematised denunciation of
art as a method. Mediation offers the key to achieving this. The theorisation of
mediation either directs sociological analyses straight to a denunciation of all the
forms of delegation and denegation that mediation supposes – this was the path
that Bourdieu chose14 – or repopulates the world with unruly intermediaries. This
is the opposite stance, the one that art history has taken, and the one which we will
explore in the next chapter.
Art or Culture
Sociology interrupts the relationship between the aesthetic subject and the artistic
object by showing the social screen which this reciprocal projection demands.
However, from that point onwards, research paths characteristically diverge,
depending on whether the screen leans more in the direction of the producers
of art or its consumers. There is a dissymmetry between the stances which these
two approaches take towards the art object. Easily (too easily?) kept at bay when
the analysis bears on audiences, markets and tastes, this object is much less
docile when artists, studios, styles and commissions are the focus of the enquiry.
Analyses of the reception of the art object seem to be more naturally suited to
sociology: they lead to a global theory of tastes, bringing the sociologists closer
to their familiar ground, which is largely independent of the constructions that
are specific to art – indeed, art disappears from the picture as it is replaced by
the sociological analysis of tastes that it allowed to develop. The preferred focus
of such analyses is aesthetic perception: socio-cultural origins, education and the
mechanisms of identity rigorously delimit the freedom of choice of audiences.15
Mobilising the Bourdieusian concept of field, the sociology of perception opens
14
Without wishing to draw hasty conclusions, it is worth recalling that this led him to
support the French comedian Coluche when he declared that he would stand for president
in 1981.
15
This process can be carried out aggressively: in France, this scenario dominates the
sociology of culture, which to a large extent proclaims its debt to Bourdieu’s works. This
claim can, however, be abusive when it loses sight of the ‘relative autonomy’ of fields and
of the ‘production’ part of its programme in order to focus only on the social stratification of
tastes. Similarly, in the Unites States, an empirical sociological trend harnesses Bourdieu’s
most positive concepts in order to ‘apply’ them to various artistic domains; cf. DiMaggio
and Useem (1978b, 1978c), Blau et al. (1985), Peterson (Moulin dir., 1989). However, this
process can also be carried out more modestly, as in the sociology of cultural practices,
which massively brings out the over-determination of tastes through statistical analyses of
the consumption, contact with, or acquisition of art works and other similar practices; cf.
the research carried out by the SER (1974, 1982), which is now the DEPS (Cogneau and
Donnat 1990).
itself up to a more intimate understanding of audiences when it focuses on the

historical or sociological study of aesthetic modes of perception,16 their collective
organisation, or their cultural policies and institutions.17 Although this concept can
become a slightly facile all-purpose solution, it allows critics to avoid bringing
back to artistic consumption the categories of a sociography which is independent
of a domain’s particular construction.
The other way to sociologise art is to examine the social conditions of its
production. This is the path chosen by those who march under the banner of the
sociology of art. This perspective focuses on the work, by considering the conditions
of the production and distribution of art, the autonomisation of a profession, and
the more or less mediated expression of a social demand. Comparatively more
problematically, it attempts to reduce art’s self-proclaimed autonomy by erecting a
succession of stage sets around it, dramatising its relationship with the social, from
the immediate context of its production to more general theories on the insertion of
art in society. This sociological perspective consists in framing the work: starting
from the organisation of artistic work and its institutions,18 it applies to the ways in
which a milieu operates, to the definition of a profession,19 to the market,20 and to
16
Cf. Round table III of the conference organised in Marseille on the sociology of art
(Moulin 1986a): ‘Publics et perception esthétique’ (‘Audiences and Aesthetic Perception’),
with contributions from N. Heinich, P. Junod, D. Gamboni and D. Russo.
17
The domain itself constitutes a field of research. Cf., in France, Friedberg and
Urfalino (1984), Poulot (1981, 1986), Urfalino (1990). In the United States, there is a long
tradition of socio-economic analysis: cf. Peterson (1976), Netzer (1978), DiMaggio and
Useem (1978a), Hendon (1979), Meyer (1979), Kamerman and Martorella (1983), Banfield
(1984), Dubin (1987), etc.; see also Round table I on ‘Politiques et institutions culturelles
[Cultural Policies and Institutions]’ in Moulin (1986a, pp. 1–133). In France, there is also a
trend which approaches cultural policies more historically and politically: see for example
the work of Laurent (1981), or Ory (1987, 1989).
18
Institutions have often offered a privileged approach to music, in particular. See for
example the opera: cf. Martorella (1982), Patureau (1986), Urfalino (1990); the orchestra:
cf. Arian (1971), Kamerman and Martorella (1983); conservatories (Hennion, Martinat and
Vignolle 1983), or the centres of contemporary creation (Menger 1989). For a more general
institutional and organisational approach to the arts, cf. DiMaggio and Hirsch (1976),
Peterson and Ryan (1982), and Adler (1979).
19
Following in the footsteps of the fundamental work of White and White (1965–91),
cf. Moulin (1967), Becker (1974), Peterson et al. (1976). On music, cf. De Clercq (1970);
on writers, cf. A. Viala (1985) who has done for French seventeenth-century writers the
equivalent of the work the Whites did on nineteenth-century painters: he looks at academies,
as well as the changing forms of patronage, the Law, the evolution of audiences, in order
to analyse the birth of the writer in the reciprocal constitution of a literary field and of the
strategies of writers. D. Gamboni’s (1989) very sociologised version of art history focuses
on the changes of tack of the writer and painter Redon in order to show how painting freed
itself from a literary model imposed by critics, in particular; cf. infra, pp. 116–17.
20
See Bourdieu (1971). On painting, see especially Moulin (1967, 1978, 1986a, b)
and Melot (1973, 1986); Menger (1989) proposes to go beyond the metaphor of the art
the systems of transmission,21 before finally focusing – if still necessary – on the

functions, uses, or deep significations of art.
From Illusion to Collective Construction
The difference between these two paths is greater or smaller depending on their
stance towards the art object. When one opts for the path opened by the sociology
of culture, objects do not count: in this case, performing a sociological analysis
means bringing our supposed realities back to the buried collective mechanisms
of production which make them appear. Unlike the second path, this option
does not involve finding the positive social causes of a given object in order to
displace the aesthetic causes which actors assign to them: instead, it entails giving
general sociological interpretations of the beliefs that subjects hold about their
objects. This explains why this sociological trend is less interested in the official
producers of art – i.e. those we call the ‘creators’.22 In the end, this sociological
trend considers that in reality it is not the artists who produce art, but its receptors:
or, to be more precise, the system of belief which as a whole constitutes an ‘art
world.’23 In the same interpretative vein, and in the wake of Kris and Kurz’s book
(1934–81, cf. infra pp. 105–6), we find a series of works on the image of artists,
which are less concerned with exploring their qualities than with what qualifies
them as artists – that is, with the collective procedure which permits the creation
of an artistic field focused on its heroes. N. Heinich thus speaks not so much of
biographies of painters, as of their ‘biographibility’ (in Vander Gucht 1989, p. 73;
see also Heinich 1991).
The more positive of the sociological trends24 focusing on production rejects
this type of circular causality, which ignores both the work and the artist. In
market: in order to give serious consideration to the notion of an economic analysis of art,
he suggests starting from the concepts and tools developed by the discipline (uncertainty,
risk), rather than the brute reality of the art market.
21
Cf. Heinich (1981), Hennion (1988).
22
Significantly, Bourdieu asks ‘But Who Created the “Creators”?’ (1993b, p. 139),
rather than what and how do they create. At the other extreme, the Wittkowers (2007) give
a detailed survey of the tendency to suicide, neurosis, and insanity of artists – as well as of
their spectacular ascensions or origins – ‘from Antiquity to the French Revolution’, without
questioning the mechanism which leads to the mythological recreation of the lives of artists,
despite noting that ‘the majority of the stories are in a class similar to the anecdotal topoi in
ancient literature on artists’ (p. 14).
23
Although he looked more closely at production than Bourdieu (except 1966),
H.S. Becker worked from the same theoretical assumption that art was a system of shared
beliefs, and focused on the ‘cooperative activity’ of ‘networks’ and ‘collective action’
(1984, p. 370) rather than on isolated creators.
24
Albrecht et al.’s (1970) reader is a good example: it offers a good empirical analysis
of the entire ‘chain of production’ of art (‘Institutions, Forms and Styles; Artists (Careers,
France, where the critical tradition is stronger than the empirical tradition, this
positive sociological trend often submits to the authority of the former, circular
one, when it is forced to voice its theory: yet, what drives its interpretation is not
so much the circularity of the social – its fundamental tautology – as intermediary
sociological notions adapted from previous investigations conducted in other
fields. This was Becker’s self-proclaimed practice: ‘I intend to approach art in
a more conventionally sociological way’ (1982, p. 352), ‘what I have done here
is’ apply ‘the sociology of occupations … to artistic work’ (1982, p. xi). Moulin
shares this view of what the sociology of art must give priority to, steering clear
of any investigations of the questions of value: ‘The institutionalisation of art,
the rationalisation of markets, and the professionalisation of artists pose familiar
problems to the sociologist’ (1989, p. 14). In France, the bulk of the research done
in the sociology of art has followed this ‘familiar’ disciplinary path.
In France, R. Moulin published the founding work of this particular sociological
trend: Le Marché de la peinture (‘The Art Market’).25 This book displays the
characteristic tension of the sociology of art, which was simultaneously instituted
under the auspices of, and against, the sociology of culture. In spite of the
references which it makes to Bourdieu – or perhaps thanks to the shelter which
these references gave to a project which risked alienating both painters, because of
its sociologist discourse, and sociologists, because of its love of art – Le Marché de
la peinture does not attempt to reveal the rules underlying the assignment of value
to contemporary art works. Nor does it seek to elucidate the hidden operations
of an artistic field which masks its collective constitution behind representations
denying their dependence on the secret laws of creation. Moulin is more prudent,
or ‘modest’, to quote her (1986a, p. xiii). She keeps repeating that she is merely
investigating the ‘social and economic constraints’ (p. 9) bearing on the relationship
between the artist and the work,26 and systematically limits the critical scope of
the sociological stance, insisting on the fact that its investigation of the ‘price of
priceless things’ must imperatively take into account the signification of art for
‘concrete people’. The market which she speaks about is not the double-edged
machine which Bourdieu evokes in order to show that the actors of a field both
construct its relative autonomy and submit to the general mechanics regulating the
construction of all fields. It is the physical and concrete space where one meets all
those who manage the relationship between ‘economic and aesthetic value’ (p. 9):
the merchants and collectors, the critics, the institutional buyers, and the painters
School, Biography), Competition; Social Position and Roles; Patronage, Publication and
Economics; Tastemakers and Publics’), gathering more general issues under a brief rubric
entitled ‘History and Theory’.
25
1967; it was republished in 1991, just before the publication of L’Artiste, l’institution
et le marché (1992).
26
‘The sociology of the art market in not in a position to prejudge the work as aesthetic
object: its objective is limited to analysing the system of constraints which are entailed by
the fact that the picture in the making is a commodity destined to be sold’ (p. 494).
themselves. The book establishes empirical typologies of these actors and their
relationships, and is, as a result, not very reductive at all. It could be that forsaking
the question of value was the price it had to pay.27 Moulin revisits this issue in her
conclusion, where, adopting a normative stance, she questions the way in which
‘commercial manipulation’ and aesthetic judgement (p. 490) increasingly tend to
be directly related, and underlines how hand-in-glove curators and restorers are.
Following on from the Whites’ argument that the nineteenth century ushered in an
era of critics and salons, putting an end to the era of patrons and academies, her
book diagnoses the start of an era of merchants and collectors.
Moulin submits today’s art market to the same analysis, focusing on the
complementary relationship between the two decisive actors of ‘the constitution
of contemporary artistic values’: the curator and the merchant, who today form
this pair, having displaced the 1950s critic and merchant (1986b, p. 384). Looking
at the internationalisation of the market, she analyses the causes and modalities
which presided over a strategic change from long- to short-termism, and from
deferred success to continuous renewal, showing that galleries and museums
worked in coordination with each other during this evolution: rather than being
rivals, these institutions were united by their ‘cultural complicity’ (p. 386), setting
the value of art works through ‘successive adjustments’ (p. 393). Having thus
restored a good series of mediators, she returns in her conclusion to the theory
of belief. Although an analysis of the ‘economic and social conditions’ (p. 369)
is sufficient for an empirical interpretation of the present state of the market, it
therefore seems to her to be lacking on a theoretical level. Having reached ‘the time
to conclude’, she feels compelled to turn to ‘the production of belief’ (p. 384; cf.
Bourdieu 1977): art acts ‘as though …’ (p. 395).28 In parallel to what she calls the
‘confused dialectics’ of commercial operations and aesthetic judgement (p. 392),
the tension between her initial restoration of mediators and their final denunciation
remains particularly strong throughout her work. From her first investigations to
her recent works, the vast gallery of portraits which she creates is what makes her
project particularly interesting: in her work, she constantly focuses her attention
on the people involved. This is a gambit that paid off: individuals do matter in the
small world of contemporary art, where institutions are tied to someone’s name.
27
In ‘La genèse de la rareté artistique’ (‘Genesis of artistic rarity’, 1978) Moulin
explicitly confronts the problem of value: however, she argues along the lines of a theory of
belief, bypassing these actors in favour of a direct comparison of four domains, in order to
highlight the ‘reversal’ which has been operated from the ‘effective’ rarity of ancient works
or of folk art to the ‘manipulated’ – i.e. artificially produced – rarity of contemporary art
works or of artistic photographs which imitate them ‘going against technical possibilities’
(p. 255).
28
As with Menger (1983), cf. infra, pp. 89–91, she achieves this final reduction on
an interrogative mode (‘are we perhaps witnessing …’). She also quotes Caillois’ well-
known words on the ‘historical parenthesis’ that art for art’s sake may constitute. At this
point, the sociology of art meets up with the internal histories of contemporary art, which is
supposedly merely ‘managing the death of art’ (C. Millet 1987, p. 299).
As Picasso once said: ‘What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had
good business acumen?’29
Although it also emphasises the way in which the art world is organised by
its actors, American sociology has on the contrary tended to show the collective
mechanisms of organisation, professionalisation and institutionalisation which are
at work behind a history of contemporary art which looks a little too much like
a catalogue of names and aesthetic labels. Invoking a mode of causality which is
just as external, some works are content to replace the global and circular causes
of the European critical tradition with the linear and partial causes of the empirical
Anglo-American tradition.30 However, most seek on the contrary to find a mode of
activation which would be more open and linked to that of the actors. Some aim
to produce a kind of episodic social history, highlighting heterogeneous factors
in order to outline some sort of general tendency.31 However, often indebted to
Becker in the way in which they proceed, American sociological works have
been more inclined to devote themselves to the one-off analysis of an institution.32
This has allowed them to identify more easily the set of factors which people
29
This quotation forms the incipit of P. Assouline’s biography of D.H. Kahnweiler
(1988), together with another cleverly juxtaposed counter-quotation by Kahnweiler: ‘It is
great artists that make great merchants.’
30
Cf. for example B. Rosenblum’s Photographers at Work (1978), which compares
photographers’ styles according to whether they work for newspapers, advertising or art.
31
On the subject of the transformation of New York’s avant-garde between 1940
and 1985, D. Crane uses an interesting term – ‘constituencies’ (1987, p. 35) – in her
investigation of museums and galleries, insisting on the local organisation of the network
and the new role the media played, presenting an alternative to the power of galleries.
Using the demographic variable the importance of which was shown by the Whites, she
demonstrates that the multiplication of the number of its artists helped New York to stay at
the centre of the art world despite the ‘enormous expansion of artistic institutions’ (p. 196).
Innovatively, she also proposes to define the ‘aesthetic and social content’ (p. 2) of styles
(Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, etc.).
32
J. Adler has thus carried out an ethnological investigation of the CalArts (1979) –
the Californian Institute of Arts – which was born of the communitarian ideals of the 1960s
but was hard hit during the following decade by issues touching on its institutionalisation,
as it found itself under pressure to choose between community and training, the utopian
dream on which it was founded and issues of career management. In the field of music,
orchestras have provoked similar investigations of the relationship between art and its
administration, cf. Arian (1971). The struggle between the Muses and administrative
priorities has been at the centre of the economic and political investigations of arts
funding carried out by Baumol and Bowen (1966), Nye (1970), Wilkie and Bradley
(1970), as well as Netzer (1978), Banfield (1984), and Friedberg and Urfalino (1984)
in France. Dubin’s (1987) work on Chicago’s artists in residence (there have been 108 a
year from 1977 to 1981) shows how public funding bodies groom artists in order to give
them subsidies. He then works hard to show the existence of a mechanism of control or
censorship (even when accepted as a productive constraint) despite having persuaded us
that such a mechanism is not even useful!
belonging to the same organisation mobilise in order to establish the criteria for
their community: a particular space provides the sociologists with cohesive factors
that no longer need to derive from a general cause.
C.R. Simpson’s innovative Soho: The Artist in the City (1981) also attempts to
respect the way in which actors construct their reality. His argument explores the
relationship which galleries and city officials themselves establish between art and
town planning. Simultaneously cause and effect, town planning acknowledges the
arts, as cities exploit and foster the artistic reputation of particular neighbourhoods
in order to enhance their own image. Examining the twin struggles of artists,
who seek to enhance their status and obtain official economic guarantees, and
of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who wish to rebrand their area (and to
increase its property values) through these two-way mechanisms, he highlights the
complex interplay between the administration, artists and population of a city, and
the politics of urban redevelopment. He shows that, far from being opposed to a
social interpretation of art, the autonomous definition of an art market is necessary
if it is to become a useful social resource. No longer focusing on those who
intervene directly in the art world, his conclusion – which invites a comparison
with Moulin’s – examines the larger circles linking them with the surrounding
community of art lovers. He emphasises the decisive role which ‘dealers’ play,
but does not really analyse it: as often happens with constructivist approaches, the
theoretical argument lags behind the field study. In this particular case, institutions
are reduced to playing a consolidating role, ‘[amplifying] the consequences of the
dealer’s selection of art and art movements’ (p. 51). Yet, the book itself showed
that this was exactly the opposite of the truth.
American sociology often hesitates between taking constructivist approaches
to their logical end, as Becker does in Art Worlds (cf. infra pp. 85–9), staying
open to critical theory, at the risk of going back to the positions of the global
sociology of culture. V. Zolberg thus pits Becker against himself by harnessing
Weber’s notion – via Bourdieu – that aesthetic value must be incorporated into
sociological analyses, because it is part of the art world: ‘Integral to the worlds
of arts themselves are evaluation and criticism’ (1990, p. xi). She charges Adler’s
(and Becker’s) analyses with not providing enough historical and structural
background (p. 213, note 16): ‘[Becker] gives little detailed attention to the
overarching macrostructure of society and polity in which these worlds function’
(p. 125). The balance between the sociology of art and the sociology of culture is
precarious. Although striking this balance depends on restoring the mediations of
art, the constructivist approach has not explicitly defined their theoretical status.
There is a danger of going back to the hackneyed questions of social history that
sociology had worked hard to reformulate – i.e. the question of genius: are artists
‘born or made’ (p. 107) – falling back on the perennial debate on the specificity
of art and the need to acknowledge the aesthetic value of the works: ‘[Becker and
Bourdieu] do not distinguish [artists] significantly from any other kind of aspiring
professionals’ (p. 129).
The Sociology of Music: The Musical Professions and the Orchestra
The sociology of music lags behind the sociology of art, in terms of the issues which
it has brought to the fore. The sociology of music has restricted itself to restoring the
social conditions and factors of the production, distribution, and reception of music,
choosing to ‘refrain from discussion of the work of art as such,’ to quote Silbermann
(1963, p. 69). What it has investigated, is the social dimension of music (a language
composes it and it is played in groups, in institutions), its function, the social groups
that play it and listen to it, as well as taste. With this linear series of domains,
Silbermann – who declares himself indebted to Weber – positions sociology in
a resolutely external and mechanical relationship both with artistic value, which
Weber sought on the contrary to integrate into sociological analysis, and with the
material formats of art, which Weber’s celebrated essay, The Rational and Social
Foundations of Music (Weber 1921, trans. 1958; cf. infra, pp. 94–5) showed the
importance of. However, Silbermann considered that ‘the technological system as
such is a neutral fact’ (1963, p. 100). Resorting to the same list-like methodology,
I. Supičić draws the sociology of music closer to empirical research, in order to
establish ‘concrete facts’ which are ‘well-determined and defined within their own
specific context’ (1987, pp. 33 and 37). He expects social history to furnish him
with the facts which the sociology of music needs. He believes that the globalising
pretensions of sociology mean that it can only be compared with ethnomusicology,
because they are both interested in the usages and functions of music rather than in
music itself.33 This corporatist sociology is deliberately content with the partial and
external explanations which some social factors provide for some elements of the
musical reality. It usually stays faithful to this instrumental model: however, when
it comes to concluding its interpretations of the relationship between music and
society, it draws on the models which propose a direct reading of art – which can
be imaginary or materialistic, depending on whether they decipher society through
art or art through society.
33
A.P. Merriam’s definition of the anthropology of music in fact posits a similar
delimitation of object and context: ‘For the musicologist, (an anthropology of music)
provides the baseline from which all musical sounds are produced as well as the
framework within which those sounds are finally understood’ (1964, p. viii); he continues
with a list of factors which would be as well suited to sociology: material culture,
functions, usages, symbols, training. Not wishing to confine ethnomusicology to distant
ethnic groups, J. Blacking, adds: ‘If some music can be analyzed and understood as tonal
expressions of human experience in the context of different kinds of social and cultural
organisation, I see no reason why all music should not be analyzed in the same way’
(2000, p. 31). He is less conciliatory than Merriam in his ambitions: he seeks to locate
the difference between ethnomusicology and musicology in their methodologies rather
than in the societies under scrutiny. Blacking’s sociologist discourse is not based on the
differences between various places but on ‘patterns of sounds as things in themselves’
(2000, p. xi); whereas Merriam and Supičić recognise the object but leave its analysis to
others, Blacking is clearly in favour of disqualifying it from sociological analysis.
On the subject of taste, the rather rudimentary sociology of music reduces

Bourdieu’s model to the basic notion that there are cultural differences between
different milieux.34 In terms of the production of music, analyses of the musical
professions have yielded interesting works which describe the characteristics
of milieux with their own rules, rites, codes and ways of working.35 Authors
emphasise the tribal way in which musical milieux close themselves off through
procedures involving internal judgements, and they analyse the limits which this
closure impose on the musicians’ control over their destiny.36 The orchestra is
the other intermediary object specific to musicians which has generated interest.
However, unlike with the musical professions, this was not because it presented
an ideal case for the application of sociological concepts, but rather because
its opacity resisted such concepts, the relationship between artistic norms and
the economic and organisational operations of a large bureaucratic structure
remaining mysterious.37 This theme resurfaces every time organisations pertaining
34
Cf. Berthier (1975), Green (1987); picking the category of ‘rock’ music apart,
Mignon, Daphy and Boyer (1986) use statistical data on the tastes of secondary school
students to invalidate the simplistic notion that there is such a thing as a homogeneous
‘adolescent taste’. Similarly, Boyer’s, Delclaux’s and Bounoure’s (1986) comparative study
of the tastes of secondary school students and their teachers concludes that far from tastes
being clearly differentiated along generational lines, they are subject to a number of factors,
blurring that line.
35
Cf. P. Gumplowicz, M. Rostain and M. Samoff (1978), as well as C. Stevens (1982)
on jazz (other than Becker, cf. infra pp. 85–6), and H.S. Bennett (1980) on rock music.
Focusing on rehearsals, Bennett’s investigation of the work and life of bands proposes a
very innovative definition of rock music based on its modes of training, work, distribution,
and collective evaluation. He suggests that this genre examines its state even as it evolves,
defining its criteria for appreciation while being performed. In other words, he presents rock
music as a music of ethnomethodologists!.
36
Showing a novel interest in the language of the actors, R.R. Faulkner launched
this path of enquiry as early as 1971, with an analysis of Hollywood studio musicians, and
then composers (1971, 1973, 1983). Far from simplistically denouncing the commercial
manipulation of music, he shows that both the market and musical careers depend on the
contrary entirely on the way in which their milieu represents them. As in Becker’s work, the
conventions (in the interactionist sense of the word) of the profession and the co-optations
of the network allow for the complex elaboration of a constant, twin-track, process of self-
evaluation, between commercial and musical values, forcing musicians to strike a balance
between ‘dignity’ and ‘flexibility’.
37
On a historical level, the contrast which musicians sunk in the orchestra ‘pit’
presented with the conductor towering above them in nineteenth-century orchestras gives a
perfect illustration of this new musical geometry. Analyses of orchestras hesitate between
describing them as groups – with a focus on the links between the professional life, training,
and careers of musicians, and their relationships with the conductor (cf. Dupin (1981),
Lehmann (1989)) – and undertaking thematic explorations of orchestral administration and
the conflict between the economic and musical challenges presented by the choice of a
musical repertoire. In his excellent book on the Philadelphia Orchestra – Bach, Beethoven
to the performing arts come under scrutiny. Thus, F. Patureau (1981) analysed
an analogous tension between operas that stage the operatic repertoire (‘opéra de
répertoire’) and those that have seasons (‘opéra de saison’) (1986, p. 86), as well
as the complex mechanisms that push the state to offer ever-increasing subsidies:
‘The opera never lives up to the hopes it gives rise to’ (p. 96).
Combining interactionism with Weber’s theories of administrative
rationalisation, J.B. Kamerman’s and R. Martorella’s book, Performers and
Performances (1983) stands out because it pays close attention to musical value,
going to unusual lengths to account for the varying qualities of interpretations. The
authors focus their analysis on a problem which performing arts institutions have
in common: their physical contact with their audiences is the reason why they all
struggle in difficult economic circumstances. Their very reason of being is also what
slows down their industrialisation, however inevitable, and the rationalisation of
their costs. However, instead of taking Baumol’s lead and exploring all the various
reasons why it is impossible for interpreters to increase their productivity and for
audiences to continue to grow indefinitely,38 Kamerman and Martorella start from
the artists’ professional administration of their performances. The dilemma which
they seek to solve, and which underlies the notion of ‘professionalism’, is not
linked to costs so much as to the risks of live performances: how to ensure live
performances, limiting their dangers and protecting oneself from these moments of
intense exposure, without, however, destroying the unplanned spontaneity which
lends their power to live performances and which alone justifies the presence of
the audience in the eyes of both the performers and the audience? Torn between
the contradictory demands of safety and necessary risk-taking, musicians exert
control over their situation through their professionalism. Problems linked to
interpretation, economics, control, management, careers or patronage are thus
connected together, and lead to the question of the administration of art. The artists’
fear counterbalances their temptation to create an extraordinary performance, the
audience’s desire to get their money’s worth contradicts their demand for ever
more rapturous experiences, the state’s wish to allocate public funds to the public
good and to make art accessible to everyone erodes its official policy of supporting
creativity without intervention. The terms of the argument are more Weberian
and Bureaucracy (1971) – E. Arian emphasises the tension between the orchestra’s old
administrative logic and its new strategy of economic success. This tension is manifested
in the way in which Stokowski’s spectacular strategy with disks and concerts forced the
orchestra to find a new balance. Arian was convinced that this founding strategy inaugurated
a period of spiralling costs and reputations, as well as the rapid rise of state subsidies. His
dynamic, internal vision of the great conductor’s personal strategy, from the choices he
made in the musical repertoire, to his programming decisions and relationships with his
audience, contrasts with the mechanistic account which Baumol and Bowen (1966) gave of
the increasing deficit of the performing arts.
38
For France, cf. Leroy (1980, 1990) or the proceeds of the 1984 conference held in
Nice, L’Economie du spectacle vivant et l’audiovisuel (addec/ser 1985).
than economic: as in Arian’s work, the disenchantment with concerts is a thread

that runs through the book. This disenchantment is as absurd as it is unavoidable,
insofar as it completely transforms from the inside an exercise which is entirely
based on the collective enchantment of artists and their audiences.39
‘Networks [of] Cooperative Activity’40
Becker, who specialised in music at the start of his career, is one of the few
sociologists working on art – that minefield – to have put an end to the oscillation
between the posture of denunciation that characterises global sociology and the
complicit stance of local sociology. Borrowing its ‘labelling theory’ from the
sociology of deviance, he takes questions posed in terms of essences or norms
and reformulates them as the professional and organised practice of a specific,
concrete, activity, performed according to particular rules. What he seeks to analyse
is not what constitutes art, but who decides what constitutes art, how, according to
what criteria, and with what consequences, whether intended or unintended. This
oblique approach leads him to restore the mediators of art instead of subordinating
them to higher orders of realities (art, society). X ‘is’ not marginal or neoclassical:
instead, that is what Y said about him. Becker refuses the easy way which passive
constructions offer (or indeed their substitutes: ‘one’, society, class relations). He
traces the process by which an artist is qualified as being this or that, in order to
see what such judgements rely on in order to become accepted, and how the artist
ends up internalising these verdicts, even if only negatively, etc. To use the passive
voice is to take the entire social definition of reality for granted.
The nuanced argument which Becker develops on jazz musicians – and returns
to in Outsiders (1963–85, chapters 5 and 6, pp. 103–44) – shows how a group
which depends for its raison d’être on its belief that it has a strong identity will
strive to distinguish itself from other groups and wear itself out in an attempt to
safeguard shared criteria for its systematically normative assessments of careers
in its field, the market and audiences, and will eventually secrete the categories of
39
Contrasting the musical profession with the social expectations created by music,
this argument evokes the works of P. Gerbod (1980) or P. Gumplowicz (1987) on the
rich history of the nineteenth-century ‘orphéon’ (the French brass bands movement).
Filled with signification and representations (of the people, power, education, etc.), this
history intersected with political and educational projects, as well as with the utopias of
philanthropists and Saint-Simonians. This history acted out in detail forms of practice and
social structures which had resolutely turned their backs on ‘any cultural aggiormento’
(Gumplowicz, p. 279). Closely tied to the social and musical hierarchy, they lovingly
and painstakingly reduplicated it, forming its popular and dominated mirror image: the
competitions and parades of ‘the little orpheonic communities’ (p. 121) formed by the
‘Crickmouils’ in Lille or the ‘Lyre’ in Anjou invite social history to question the ambiguity
of the word ‘popular’ and of the quality and endurance of styles.
40
Becker (1982, p. 370).
its own isolation, or indeed of something like its collective failure. Jazz musicians
do not really form a ‘deviant’ group, of course. However, as a group, they share
many distinguishing characteristics: they work at night, their employment is
systematically insecure, and their relationship with their audience is ambiguous.
Becker’s methodology allows him to see how musicians rationalise their radical
antagonism with, and disdain for, ‘squares’ (non-musicians) and how they perceive
their relationship with their audience in moral terms (to sell oneself or not). This
leads Becker to argue that the judgements made by insiders are fundamentally
at odds with those of outsiders. Despite the opposition between musicians who
engage in ‘commercial’ or non-‘commercial’ work, Becker demonstrates the
consensus that exists around this omnipresent criterion of commercialism. He
shows how jazz musicians cultivate their own marginality or segregation, and
are absurdly inclined to worship antisocial acts. He highlights the circular way in
which they use their connections to manage their careers, and their slow acceptance
of commercialism. He analyses the way in which they enter the group, the quasi-
obligatory break which this entails with their families, and the disdain which they
show for their ‘good woman’, who is first and foremost their best-known ‘square’
and an obstacle confronting the musicians’ conformity to the collective image
that they would like to project. He demonstrates that the antagonism between
the commercial and the artistic no longer bears on an aesthetic dilemma, but is a
function of the group’s mode of self-definition: of the shared judgement through
which it conceives of itself, manages its internal differences, and disqualifies the
judgements of outsiders by ostracising them – all the more so since it is entirely
financially dependent on those outsiders. In the end, the picture which Becker
paints of jazz musicians is rather pathetic. However, French musicians will easily
recognise these eternally dissatisfied musicians: trapped between betrayal and
failure, they actively construct their identity around their marginality, defensively
preferring to allow their collective identity to be closed off, even if it means letting
others take control of their destinies.41
Becker returned to art in 1982, with Art Worlds (1982), which focuses on other
art forms than music. Adopting what he calls a traditional sociological perspective,
Becker analyses art in terms of a cooperative network which is conventionally
organised around the production and consumption of works. By ‘art worlds’, he
means circles within which art is recognised as such. Presenting art as a collective,
conventional, and organised reality – as opposed to worlds which are fascinated by
art objects or their creators – Art Worlds also has the merit of putting the producers
of art supplies, those who distribute the works, audiences, artists, critics, publishers,
the state, and theoreticians on the same plane. They all contribute to the existence
41
Investigations of orchestral musicians yield surprisingly similar results: striving to
maintain what sets ‘them’ apart from ‘others’, they delegate all administrative tasks to non-
musicians: setting programmes, organising tours, fees, communication. Since the public
image of the orchestra focuses on the conductor alone, these musicians are dispossessed of
their whole musical destiny.
of a shared world of art. There is no art outside these worlds. Conversely every
single link in the network depends on every other. Anyone who refuses to play his
or her part threatens the existence of the network or alters its characteristics. He
considers the case of the avant-gardes, for example: is it possible to avoid making a
judgement on the object, by simply decreeing that all artistic value lies in the gaze
of those who endorse or condemn it? Far from this being the case, Becker shows
that the avant-gardes themselves never stop pronouncing judgements.42 And far
from being free of all norms, as they provocatively like to assert, the avant-gardes
ceaselessly feel the need to qualify themselves, like the ne’er-do-wells in Street
Corner (Whyte 1943). They do this in ways that are very normative, if not normal,
checking that their innovations are not at risk of becoming fashionable or media-
friendly, for example: faced with whatever the traditionalists accuse them of, they
never stop producing conformity.
Becker’s straightforward hypothesis that art involves generalised
interdependencies is supposed to make the big questions obsolete. Art is not
an object to be defined by the sociologist, but the product of the work of actors
who seek to define it. Are there criteria for beauty? It all depends on what
aestheticians do to establish such criteria. In order for something to be art, it
has to be accepted as such by an art world. This hypothesis also allows Becker
to submit networks of actors to the same analysis, whether they succeed or
fail, whether they struggle to make art – or to make something else, even if it
means being assimilated later. Can art endure across the ages? It all depends on
the art world’s strategies for conservation and its storage systems. The staying
power of art works depends indissociably both on their quality and on the
presence of a world which values them: their persistence is less the result
of the fact that ‘large numbers of people actively appreciate them’ (p. 367),
which seldom happens, than of the action of a milieu able to make their
historical value sustainable.43 The meaning and the audience of ‘universal’ art
keep changing, and it is always being reframed by its publishers, given new
interpretations, hijacked by new theories, and harnessed by audiences which
are at odds with each other. Everything is dependent on everything else, from
the level of development of the art world, to the level of consensus that exists
about conventions, the nature of available resources, and the anticipation of
the demands of the audience, etc.
Whether he is writing about artisans, aesthetic changes, deviant strategies, folk
or naive art, mavericks who stand up to the establishment, or official avant-gardes,
Becker has no difficulty showing the general instability of any definition and the
lack of consistency of the works across their different incarnations. At the moment
42
He quotes R. Moulin several times on the about-turn which contemporary art
has operated by focusing on the artist, allowing it to ‘sociologise’ aesthetics itself: art is
whatever the artist does.
43
This constitutes yet another version of the reversal underlying investigations of art
which explore it in terms of belief.
of conception, artists (including novelists sitting alone in front of their desks) are
constantly integrating a multiplicity of heterogeneous and variable constraints,
which extend from what supplies are available to them to the character of their
publishers, the state of the market, the reactions of those they are close to, to
educated guesses about how their colleagues will evolve, and how their critics
see them. There is no clear dividing line between the production of contents and
modes of consumption: artists cross that line soon as they anticipate any constraint.
Conversely, the judgements that critics formulate do not intuit a latent level of
quality, but produce it, altering the meaning of the works they evaluate, while also
basing themselves on a series of anticipations about their audiences, careers and
the audiences of the works under discussion. We are not faced with a transparent
artistic world which has been made opaque by external forces, so much as with an
opaque network which will not stretch further unless a few individuals weave it
further. Becker’s vivifying brand of sociology steers clear of principles but stays
close to the work of the actors: people get by, one way or another. The social
groups that produce art have developed a thousand ways to survive. Nothing is
indispensable. No convention must be obeyed at any cost: a convention is an
admissible constraint. If it is not, then it is simply a matter of devoting time and
energy to becoming able to do without it.
Conventions make collective action simpler and less costly in time, energy and
other resources … To say all this goes beyond the assertion that art is social and
beyond demonstrations of the congruence between forms of social organisation
and artistic styles or subjects. It shows that art is social in the sense that it is
created by networks of people acting together, and proposes a framework in
which differing modes of collective action, mediated by accepted or newly
developed conventions, can be studied. (pp. 396–70)
Depending on how one reads it, Art Worlds can seem extreme or insignificant.
Its stylistic neutrality fosters a sense of disappointment in the disciplined reader:
making art requires several people to get together, organise themselves, share
conventions and obtain resources. Becker says nothing more: ‘I would not try
to settle questions of relative aesthetic worth by sociological analysis’ (p. 352);
‘I have been more concerned with patterns of cooperation among the people who
make the works than with the works themselves’ (p. ix). But nothing prevents
us from giving Becker’s work an ironical reading. Although he does not venture
beyond the sociology of occupations, it is difficult to imagine going back to
discussing art as before: anything one might say would have a different meaning.
The creators of art works have become workers, their audience have morphed
into their producers, and the activity of theoreticians is now understood as a sort
of repair job. We have to rethink everything if there are no enduring definitions or
stable boundaries, and if no principle can withstand an activity where everything
is interconnected and where everyone is just trying to get by one way or another.
There is an artful contrast between the simple argument which this misleadingly
unassuming book develops and its extremely important consequences.44
The Construction of the Musical Field: The Case of Contemporary Music
In France, the most interesting research that has been carried out in the sociology
of music oversteps the limits of perspectives which focus on the production of
music but consider it only as a collective construction, by exploiting the space
which the ‘relative autonomy’ implicit in the notion of field opens up for the
description of the particular mechanisms of the musical world: calling for analyses
of the collective actors of musical production, audiences included, this notion also
breaks with the mechanical character of the sociology of tastes.45 P.-M. Menger’s
(1979, 1983) works on contemporary music have become a sort of model in this
field. The evolution of Menger’s thought is emblematic of the problems which
music presents sociology with. Refusing the particularistic notion that an area
might be singled out as escaping the scope of sociological analysis, he understands
his task to entail the methodical application of the conceptual tools of sociology
to a specific area in order to give a partial interpretation of it. Although Menger’s
measured programme recalls Moulin’s or Becker’s, it nevertheless draws on the
balance he strikes between two objectives which are much broader in scope: a
highly critical initial position, and a paradoxical final position which – in an attempt
to move away from Bourdieu, whose systematic ambitions Menger objected
to – ends up rooting social criticism in the more sure-footed laws of nature. His
hesitation between sociologistic discourse and naturalistic discourse presents
us with a refined version of the ruptures which the musical object confronts the
sociological analyst with.
44
Becker does not always formulate these consequences, but leaves his readers to
do this for themselves, arguably depriving his work of the benefit of its full theoretical
implications: but is that really a fault in a book?
45
Thus, whereas the ethnicising interpretations of F. Newton (1959) or E. Southern
(1971) reduce jazz music to black music, the work that J.-L. Fabiani (1986) or P. Gumplowicz
(1990, 1991) have carried out on this subject shows how closely musicians, critics and
music lovers had to work in order to constitute it as an increasingly clearly identified
domain: ‘There would be no jazz music if it were not for a skilful (and often semi-skilful)
history of reappropriation of the primitivism and exoticism of pulsating rhythms’ (Fabiani,
p. 231). It is hard to tell who constituted this music: ever since its origins, it seems to have
owed its existence to the commentaries which it provoked, from the Europeans who took
hold of it and gave it its name at the start of the twentieth century, to the racially conscious
activists of free jazz and the French activists who idealised them in May 1968 – it was
with these French activists in mind that Carles and Comolli wrote Free Jazz/Black Power
(1971), using a magical slash to reconcile the aesthetic and political revolutions that proved
so difficult to marry over there ….
Let us start with sociologistic criticism: ‘The closure of the field of musical
creation and the limited number of channels for financing the production and
distribution of contemporary works determine the pre-eminence of professional
positions over the works themselves in the market’ (1979, p. 1). How well he puts
this … La Condition du compositeur (‘The Composer’s Condition’) describes a
profession which has been reduced to teaching posts and which is ‘increasingly
directly dependent on public funds and cultural voluntarism’ (p. 28): the term
‘research’ functions as a sort of metaphorical G-string, which simultaneously
covers up and discloses the double game of artists who want to be able to have
their cake (absolute independence from all social demands) and eat it. Menger
does not in any way attempt to hide the fact that his analysis is concerned with
demystification. ‘Vigorously’ underlining ‘just how much the promising word
‘research’ can seek to mystify’ (p. 18), he denounces the ‘corporatism, which is the
professional alter-ego of aesthetic relativism and is at work in a market of creation
entirely run on administrative lines’ (pp. 32–3) – or the eclecticism (p. 57) – of
works which, evading the need for an actual aesthetic by merely signalling their
modernism, are ‘the entirely replaceable incarnations of artistic Novelty in general’
(p. 96). At the risk of ‘incarnating a superconsciousness standing in the midst of
a world he does not belong to’ – as R. Moulin writes in her Preface to Paradoxe
du musicien (1983, p. 6) – Menger concludes with a plea for confronting artists
with audiences, if not the market: ‘Selective incentives have become significantly
transformed into an etiolated relationship between a community of peers sitting
on the committees which place the commissions and the growing body of creators
who are administratively authorised to write commissioned works to order’
(p. 115).
So ‘vigorous’ is this analysis that it comes close to suggesting corruption as
one reads of ‘artistic research which can sometimes be protected by a climate
of complacent irresponsibility’ (p. 130). We are far from the Weberian stance of
axiomatic neutrality which Menger will later display in Le Paradoxe du musicien,46
and which conforms more closely to the model of the simultaneously autonomous
and dependent analysis of a ‘field’, insofar as it prohibits remaining ‘indifferent
to the mediations’ which are specific to an area (Menger 1983, p. 17), as do social
philosophies of art, such as Adorno’s, according to him. He wishes to:
show how the creative act inhabits the space of possibilities which the musician’s
past leads to, how his project relates to the position which the composer
occupies in the community formed by his peers and rivals, [and] how the system
of aesthetic values acts on and reacts to his professional and social trajectory,
his hopes, his dreams of success, the conscious and unconscious expectations
that determine what he feels about the market which is open to his works, more
46
And which Menger reasserts in his response to Nattiez (1989, p. 171), cf. infra,
p. 93, n. 50.
or less directly relating his aesthetic decisions to the stands that his colleagues
take. (1983, p. 23)
A critical report is not a book: Menger’s report is informal and close to the problems
of the actors. He allows himself the freedom to make more personal judgements
and adopt more normative points of view than the specialised scholarly works
published on the sociological market, which is itself also tributary of a community
of peers sitting on the committees which commission the works. The significant
amount of rewriting which led to Paradoxe thus clearly exhibits the demands
placed on an author who, in his first report, cannot be accused of being lukewarm,
by a sociological stance which may be rigorously defended at the level of its
principles, especially as far as its aesthetic judgements are concerned. Rewriting
La Condition in order to produce Paradoxe, Menger thus engaged in a twofold
process which was both negative and positive, softening his tone but emphasising
the play of causes. He downplayed the negative judgements which readers in a
hurry might easily read into the 1979 volume, which condemned assisted creation,
the overprotection of a world which is its own judge, its irresponsible behaviour
towards its audiences, its emphasis on novelty for the sake of novelty, and its
intellectualism. Following this, he uses interviews with 300 composers, as well
as statistics on commissions placed, distribution and incomes, together with a
brief historical overview of the aesthetic developments of twentieth-century art
music. What in his report seemed to be an assessment of the current state of that
music, now does in fact reveal the complex relationships at play. However, when
in conclusion the author returns to the question of the lack of success of modern
music, he is forced to reformulate this problem in different terms, because, for
better or for worse, sociological explanations can seem to justify this predicament,
since it no longer appears merely scandalous or arbitrary when one presents the
accumulation of deep-rooted causes which have led to the present situation. This
situation is now seen to be the consequence of tendencies which are greater than it
is, and which are linked to the opposition between art music and popular music, the
increasing popularity of disks, the creation by the media of a market for classical
works, and the greater autonomy of contemporary art compared to previous forms,
as well as from its present (but mostly absent) audience.
In Paradoxe, Menger returns to the two themes of the transformation into

researchers of creators who hesitate between freedom and assistance,47 and
the closure of a world which only accepts the internal judgements of its own
members.48 However, Menger weaves these two themes into a new argument about
the influence of the market – about the invisible hand which condemns modern
creators to overinvest in their isolation and (turning necessity into a law) forces
them to bet on the future, since they face unfair competition from past composers
at present: ‘early music kills contemporary music.’49 Now Menger emphasises the
seriousness of this ‘modern musical schism’ (note p. 9). Even before it led to the
radical and irreversible split which exists now between composers and audiences,
this schism had already dissociated composers and interpreters, professionals and
music lovers, written and oral musics, art and popular musics, and elite and mass
musics, as well as the ‘classical’ and the contemporary within art music. This
schism was not so much the outcome of a deliberate aesthetic strategy than of a
covert systemic effect which can only be analysed by simultaneously taking into
account the various music markets.
Menger’s sociological analysis thus introduced the notion that there was some
historical continuity in modern musical creativity, despite its apparent discontinuity.
What explains this continuity? Is it the result of an enduring social illusion? Or
is it that music has natural origins? In a manner particularly well-entrenched in
the case of music, musicologists themselves tend to attribute natural origins to
music, because they are constrained to establish the reality of their elusive object
even as they analyse it (cf. infra, pp. 209–19) – even if this does not prevent them
from emphasising its equally ‘natural’ ability to give immediate expression to the
inner self or the power of the collective, depending on whether they are more
closely affiliated with psychology or ethnology. This being the case, how can one
account for the contemporary creators’ break with both tonality and audiences?
The way in which Menger eventually interprets this ‘contemporary schism’ in
Paradoxe is itself paradoxical: he suggests in extremis that contemporary music
is not natural, and that this could explain its failure. In terms of the competition
between contemporary and past musics, Menger’s interpretation should logically
47
This assistance is supported by the ‘advertising and administrative crutches’
of the state (p. 330). Menger develops this argument further on the subject of musical
‘laboratories’, where technology increased the dependence of composers by forcing them
to rely on industry as well as the state, despite their increasingly fierce assertions of their
autonomy: ‘There is no other area of artistic creation that is more dependent on public
funds. At the same time, there is also no other area which seems so heavily reliant on
technical developments largely dictated by the industrial market’ (1989, p. 17).
48
‘Only composers seem to be in a position to conceive of and distribute the support
which they receive’ (1983, p. 335).
49
R. Wangermée developed this argument before him (1948, p. 29, quoted by
C. Deliège in Vanhulst and Haine 1988, p. 193) in his analysis of the consequences for
musical creation of the fact that musical recordings amounted to creating a ‘universal
musical museum’ (these words are Deliège’s (ibid.)), competing with new productions.
lead him to challenge the notion that tonal music is natural, just as he does with
contemporary music. The obvious discontinuity between these two forms of
music masks their covert continuity, insofar as they are both social constructions:
tonal music is no more natural than contemporary music, it has just been more
fully naturalised. Underlining, rather than challenging, the artificial character of
contemporary music, and establishing the fact that other musics are equally artificial
but better at disguising this fact, such an argument would make this critique of
contemporary music appear less scandalous, weakening this aspect of Menger’s
argument. Menger, however, is not prepared to approach the interpretation of
music in such a straightforwardly Bourdieusian light: he has always been opposed
to the imperialism of Bourdieu’s global critique.50 At the same time, the systemic
conception which he has of sociological explanations makes it impossible for him
to be content with the ‘simple’ description of the mediations between sounds and
ourselves which establish music. Having closed off all sociological avenues, the
natural path is the only one left open to him, and he cautiously takes it. Invoking
Lévi-Strauss and Caillois, he concludes that a linguistic error explains the failure
of contemporary music, as opposed to the ‘extraordinary coherence’ which the
tonal language gives to classical music, deriving it from its obedience to the
laws of nature, according to Lévi-Strauss (quoted pp. 279–80).51 Even if put in
prestigious authors’ mouth, this explanation has nothing in common with the
50
It is amusing to see how, on the one hand, E. Schepens’ review of Paradoxe
(Vibrations 1987, pp. 292–300) emphasises Menger’s unexpectedly naturalistic conclusion,
criticising this lapse in the name of the sociologistic orthodoxy, while, on the other,
J.-J. Nattiez (1989, pp. 153, 159), blinded by anti-sociologist sentiment, insists on reading
Paradoxe as though it merely transposed Bourdieu …) to the field of music – although
this does not stop him from also accusing Menger of returning to tonality. Ironically,
Menger on the contrary challenged the Bourdieusian orthodoxy by daring to question –
even if this interrogation is left open-ended – the power and the significance of the tonal
‘moment’ (1983, p. 280), which he linked to the submission of musical languages to the
‘laws of nature’.
51
Proceeding cautiously, his sentences filled with adverbs and question marks (‘How
much more time before …?’, ‘Should we suppose that …?’ (p. 337)) Menger quotes
Caillois’ well-known remark in conclusion: ‘Autonomous art may have only constituted an
interval, a sort of mode in the history of humankind’ (p. 337). Answering Nattiez (1989),
Menger argued that he had merely quoted Lévi-Strauss, presenting without taking sides the
debate between relativists and objectivists which had shaken the musical world. Indeed,
to accuse him of wishing to restore tonality is to show oneself to be unable to distinguish
between his sociological point of view and the perspectives of the actors he quotes.
Nevertheless, the role of nature in the list of causes which he invokes remains problematic.
I do not mean to say that Menger should be summoned to make a choice between nature and
society, but that, having turned his back on sociologist discourse, he found himself unable
to accommodate them both and was only able to take on their duality with protective layers
of question marks.
former interpretation of the ‘break’ as a systemic effect of market, making dead

creators unfairly compete with living ones.
It seemed to us that this was worth remarking on, together with Menger’s
rigorous attempt at coherence: in the absence of a theory of mediation, it is not
possible to relativise sociologist discourse without going back to a naturalist
discourse. Querying the power which tonality derives from its ‘natural anchor’ –
these famous words are also Lévi-Strauss’ – Menger found himself confronted
with the problematic intertwining of people and things in musical objects. With
characteristic even-handedness, he leaves us faced with a dualism which would be
inconceivable within the frame of traditional sociology: sometimes he understands
the world in social terms, and sometimes in natural terms, leaving readers to tilt the
balance this or that way depending on their own sensibilities. Counterbalancing
the sociologistic positions which bring every supposedly natural object back to a
hidden social relationship, and the naturalistic perspectives which bring music back
to universal human or physical laws, Menger’s dual stance opens up the debate
to every possible position in between. One can only move beyond this stance by
turning to another research programme: that is, by paying renewed attention to
mediations, and showing how the production of music always involves the mutual
intertwining of people and things, instead of leaving it up to scholars to choose
between them, depending on their chosen discipline. It is not a matter of more
or less graciously acknowledging the social or natural character of music, but of
understanding how musicians have made it into a reality inextricably inscribed in
nature, society, and the body.
The ‘Natural and Social’ Foundations of Music
Weber’s Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1921, trans. 1958) can be read
as the first attempt to analyse music which focuses precisely on the question of
how to turn music into an object, instead of taking this as given in advance. Such a
reading might explain why this very allusive short work has become such a classic,
despite its inconclusive arguments and rather amateurish grasp of musicology.
Weber’s Musical Foundations also have another advantage: they do not separate
analyses focusing on music from the work which music does. Returning to a long
tradition of calculations concerned with harmonic proportions, Weber’s history
of music is very linear. It leads us seamlessly from primitive musical theories
founded on the physiological or psychological resolution of moments of tension,
to the development of an increasingly rational music, in the Weberian sense of the
term – i.e. a music which adapts its means to its ends. From the Arabs to Helmholtz,
we follow music moving away from speech, magic and the sacred, the increasing
autonomy of melody, the birth of aesthetic intentions, the professionalisation of
musicians, the progressive development of solmisation and polyvocality, as well
as – and especially – of music notation, that ultimate form of mediation:
Why did polyphonic as well as harmonic-homophonic music and the modern

tone system develop out of the widely diffused preconditions of polyvocality
only in the Occident? … The specific conditions of musical development in the
Occident involve, first of all, the invention of modern notation. (1958, p. 83)
The notation of music is of fundamental importance because it introduces a

new possibility of ‘mapping’ (p. 87) complex compositions – this notion of
supervision is a Weberian theme par excellence. Unlike his epigones, however,
Weber does not end his history of music on this shift from oral to written musical
forms: he develops it further, looking at the normalisation of instruments, and
then at temperament – this ‘arbitrary equalisation of tones’ – which was itself a
prerequisite for the elaboration of the tonal system and depended for its conception
on the improvement of instrumental workmanship (p. 94):
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the clavecin doubtless participated in the
development of music which was melodically and rhythmically transparent. It
was one of the mediators for the penetration of popular simple harmonic feeling
opposite the polyphonic art music. (p. 119)
The many interlocking musical transformations which Weber highlights make

this book particularly interesting and are the reason why its programmatic
value endures to this day. Challenging the modern positivist split between the
psychological anthropology of music and the sociological analysis of what
conditions it from the outside, this accumulation allows Weber to show very
clearly that music did not become an object as a result of the discovery of its deep
laws, following gradual developments in musical resources. The opposite was
true: music presented itself as such more and more ‘naturally’ as a large number
of small and heterogeneous rationalising developments gradually started to fall
into line: the development of the keyboard allowed us to visualise the scales,
while notation added temporal development to this; the musical professions
became more autonomous; instruments were standardised and started to occupy a
configured sonorous space; temperament became more even; the bourgeois usage
of a pleasurable, ornamental music freed it from excessively ponderous functions;
and concerts started to present is as a refined consumer product. Although all
these rationalisations of music seemed merely to simplify a music which already
existed, they in fact produced it.
Delusion and Bias
Institutions, organisations, professions, networks, collective action, conventions,

markets … the key concepts of sociology have freed the art work from the hold of
aesthetics, which the sociology of culture criticised, and have made its production
the locus of numerous partial, heterogeneous, and more or less direct and convergent
actors and factors, which are all highly empirical, historical and verifiable. The
decision of sociology to confine itself to restoring such intermediaries by hunting
down the actors responsible for evaluation had a strategic function: it allowed this
discipline to demarcate itself clearly from philosophy. Instead of pondering the
qualities of art objects, it started to focus on how their qualities were attributed to
them. Although this focus stayed the same as the sociology of culture gave way to
the sociology of art, the way in which causes were distributed and the role of the
mediations which were being restored underwent profound alterations.
The sociology of culture considers that art is a mediator for the group, and
that restoring its mediating character entails denouncing the claims art makes to
autonomy, this being merely a artifice necessary for this mediation. Interpretation
involves unveiling the effects of belief which connect subjects to objects on the
surface, while they are unconscious of the mechanisms of representation which
allow their confrontation. Initially, mediation served to change the nature of art
objects, by taking them out of the aesthetic realm and into the social world where
they fulfilled not so great functions. However, mediation ended up vanishing from
sociological analyses, displaced by the real cause of the effects of belief – i.e.
by the disguised mechanics of the social (whether these mechanics are attributed
to the positive and invisible reality of Durkheim’s social facts as things, or to
Bourdieu’s negative principle of distinction and its denial). As this final cause was
revealed, mediation was deprived of the causal function which it had temporarily
held (while art was granted ‘relative’ autonomy’) and was relegated to a purely
instrumental function. Art was a delusion, an illusion, in the strongest sense of the
term: what was at stake was the fulfilment of social reality.
The sociology of art and the sociology of culture are both united against the
history of art by the fact that all the causes which they mobilise and the mediations
which they introduce are social. And they have good reasons for this: these
causes and mediations must stand up to the art work. However, in the sociology
of art, mediation has a higher degree of reality because this discipline locates its
mediators in the intermediary concepts of sociology: rather than attributing them
to a disguised general causality, it finds them in a series of linear causes bearing on
the specialised terminology of sociology. Rather than displacing art with a general
interpretation, the sociology of art explains it through an accumulation of factors.
Although these factors (the role of institutions, the increasing autonomy of artistic
professions, the laws of the market, the perverse consequences of organisation,
etc.) are limited and do not make it possible on their own to generate a global
causality, they nevertheless can still contribute, however diffusely, to a general
explanation – as opposed to the art object-as-mediator in the sociology of culture.
This is because nothing lies behind these factors: there is no larger explanation to
cancel them out and turn them into mere instruments, as in the sociology of culture.
Hence the generally open-ended tone which works in the sociology of art adopt
when they reach the point when they ought to draw some conclusions. To the ‘So
what?’ which greets excessively partial explanations, sociologists of art can only
answer, as Becker does, that they have staged no revolution, but that nobody can
ignore what they have revealed. Art is not beautiful in and of itself, but as a result
of all the factors which define its beauty. The sociology of art does no more than
shift the perspective on art. This is both a strength and a weakness: it relies on the
notion that someone, somewhere, endows art with ‘real’ value, however minimal
this value may be, in order to be able to counter this argument and show how in
reality art is inflected by the social games that actors play.52 This means that there
is still an opposition to the supposed aestheticism of definitions locating the value
of art works in the art works themselves. The sociology of art – which is in this
respect like the sociology of culture, even though it does this implicitly rather
than explicitly – obstinately persists in emphasising the influence of the norms of
milieux, juries, academies, patrons, critics, merchants, and the tastes of purchasers
and decision-makers.
This is still a negative model of mediation, but a model which no longer
instrumentalises it by putting it in the service of a higher cause, as in the sociology
of culture. Delusion has become bias. In the sociology of art, mediation is no longer
a means towards demystification: instead, it is a systematic shift in perspective,
allowing the sociologist to refresh the memory of the actors by reminding them
of mediation. This is a significant development. The outcome of this linear model
is that the art object is no longer a mere internal illusion shared by a group, but
is now an external phenomenon. At the outset, the cause is no longer attributed
to the general social principle which mediation only served to introduce, it is the
concrete accumulation of the specific mechanisms at play between an art work and
its social value. The sociology of art is closer to social history than the sociology
of culture.53 This also explains why, once it had established itself, the sociology
of art, rather than actively restoring the mediations of art, felt it was ‘simpler’ to
limit itself to an analogous yet distinct task, which was undoubtedly more modest
but yet productive: to draw out the ‘context’ of artistic creation. This allows for the
possibility of a dual form of disciplinary complementarity: with aesthetics, on the
one hand, as soon as the sociology of art no longer deals with the art works; and
with the sociology of culture, on the other, to which the sociology of art is happy
to relegate the social as a general theoretical principle – so long as everyone agrees
that this concerns the reception of the works exclusively, of course.
52
Faced with this problem, L. Boltanski highlighted the same paradox at work in the
demystification of belief: ‘the unveiling of belief cannot completely renounce its reliance on
a fixed point, on a reality truer than illusion on the basis of which belief can be denounced
as such’ (2012, p. 22).
53
There is a more sociologistically inclined Anglo-American trend of art history which
has taken this exact path and is known for its detailed investigations of the mechanisms
through which art works are designated as such: cf. Baxandall (1985); F. Haskell had
already voiced this idea (see for example 1976), cf. infra, p. 138.
The Object, or Sociology’s Forbidden Fruit
Clearly, however, this peace treaty (which Bourdieu said he rejected, cf. supra,
p. 48, n. 11) was signed at the expense of the art works themselves: having grown
up, as it were, they now escaped the scope of sociologists confining themselves
to investigations of their genesis, sociologists let art historians and aestheticians
take over, letting them look at the specific contents of art works. Sociologists have
nevertheless returned to the fray at a later stage by turning their attention to what
becomes of the objects which art produces – what uses they are put to, what effects
they have – without, however, questioning their contents. Sociologists have lost
their grip on investigations of the art works, and are unable to say anything about
them, whether they specialise in the sociology of the production and distribution
of works of art, or in the sociology of their reception. This is not to say that we
should turn back the clock and consider art works as art works, but rather that
we must break down the opposition between the art work and the social with
an active theory of what links them together. For the peace treaty which I have
just evoked was also signed on the back of mediation, if by mediation we mean
an active and productive operation which cannot be separated from its objects
and can be attributed to identifiable actors. In the sociological landscape which
that treaty has created, mediations are only mediations by name: they are like
civil servants applying a clear set of rules relating to the small area which they
administrate – professional bodies, the teaching of art, art criticism, the art
market – while remaining completely indifferent to the works in question. The
price to pay for peace is always high. This inadequate positivist restoration of
mediation only went half-way, leaving them in mid stream, as it were. This is what
motivates (without justifying it) the language Duvignaud resorts to in his works:
considering that sociologists of art ‘discuss works of art with the incompetence of
philistines’ (1973a, p. 35), he argues that ‘in most cases, they have been concerned
to isolate artistic expression to a milieu or else to study the environment of art …
as if this could possibly lead to any serious understanding of the exact nature of
artistic creation!’ (p. 36).
The excessively disciplined stance of the sociology of art had a knock-on
effect: it encouraged the sociology of culture to fight the return to aesthetics more
aggressively, because it was under the impression that it was entirely responsible
for the critique of the object, which was a heavy burden to bear. At the same time,
the sociology of culture forms a possible theoretical background for the sociology
of art, which is always a fall-back position for the sociologists of art, because
they are conscious of its limits. The passive restoration of the mediators of art –
in the empirical and concrete sense of hunting down those who are responsible
for making aesthetic judgements – is unstable because it remains untheorised. If
anyone questions this pursuit, considering it useless if it does not reveal anything
about art itself, this restoration can backtrack at any time, leading sociologists of
art on one of two diametrically opposed paths. The first of these paths entails a
return to aesthetics, following in Francastel’s footsteps, which is what Duvignaud
(1973a, 1973b) and Bastide (1977) did. This reaction provokes problematic
questions about the delimitation of disciplinary areas of specialism: working on
art seems to have led sociologists of art into a trap, forcing them to engage in
historical investigations that would have been better performed by art historians.
The second of these paths makes sociologists of art regress in the opposite
direction: aligning themselves with the theoretical formulation of the restoration
of the intermediaries of art in the sociology of culture, they are constrained to go
back to actively opposing aesthetics. In the face of the autonomy of the art object,
this restoration becomes a process of demystification, while the intermediaries
or art are turned into mediators which are themselves merely vectors of the
social causes that art lovers deny in order to assert the purity of their love for
art. As sociology thus rekindles its adhesion to the model of belief, it turns to
anything that might allow it to escape the confrontation between the subject of
taste and the aesthetic object. As for the producers and distributors of art, the
emphasis which the sociology of art places on the systematic arbitrariness of the
mechanisms through which art objects are elected and evaluated finds a parallel in
the focus which the sociology of culture – which is concerned with the reception
of art – places on the social determinants of taste and the economic context of
artistic value. For the sociology of art, this twofold regression also cancels the
peace treaty which it had signed with the sociology of culture: once again, the art
object confronts sociologists of art with a problem: they have to decide between
accepting or attacking it, rather than evading the issue, as they could more or less
do until then.54
Insofar as it makes any sense to consider the general orientation of sociology,
it must thus be admitted that it may not be the best discipline through which to
approach mediation. Generalising sociological trends explicitly turn against
mediation in order to unmask the true principles of the social. Empirical, positivist
sociological trends opt for one specific mechanism of mediation (profession,
norms, market, institution, networks, etc.), and turn it into a social factor. The real
cause which cancels out the mediations of art no longer lies in society or in a social
mechanism, but in such intermediary concepts of sociology. Whereas sociologists
of culture see the mediations of art as secondary proxies for their social causes,
54
Nevertheless, the sociology of art had moved forward. Its confrontation with the
sociology of culture was no longer speculative: it was now based on shared methods, fields
and problems. In particular, these problems were shared with the ‘new’ history of art: in
art history, the works of M. Baxandall (1971, 1972) or S. Alpers (1983, 1988) integrated
Goffman’s or Becker’s sociological hypotheses (cf. infra, Chapter 5), as did C. Ginzburg’s
(2000) mischievous incursions in this area. As a result of this disciplinary cross-fertilisation,
lines of argumentation became more subtle (cf. ‘Art et sciences sociales’, Moulin dir. (1989))
and it was no longer possible to exclude anything on principle. Empirical imperatives now
constrained sociologists to follow the example of art historians and produce detailed work
based on precise, localised analyses, steering clear from generalisations which ran counter
to the erudition of historians.
sociologists of art reduce them to simple explanatory factors, focusing on some

mediations at the expense of others without any justification.
We have seen Durkheim make a mutually exclusive distinction between
social symbolic objects and secular natural objects, and decree that the latter do
not belong to the sociological field of competence. Born of this divide, modern
sociological discourses have masterfully elaborated ever less positive definitions
of the social, but remain unable to escape Durkheim’s dualism and come closer
to the object. They either cancel it, arguing that in reality, it is a sign, a pretext, or
indeed a medium for social games, or else they admit it as a natural given which
simply exists within a social world. The discrepancy between the sophistication of
the sociological definition of the social and the inadequacy of its treatment of the
object is so great that it calls for interpretation. Beyond exhibiting the impact of the
distinction which scientistic discourses make between natural and social objects,
this seems to me to be the product of a genuine prohibition which can be traced
back to Comte and to the anti-philosophical origins of sociology, via Durkheim:
one cannot allow the object to retain a certain amount of power without re-
examining the ontological questions, which sociology disqualified from the start.
This taboo has the opposite consequence: even as it sides with signs over objects,
sociology upholds – by not thinking it through – a distinction which evokes those
it sought to overcome between being and appearance, substance and phenomenon.
Depending on the whims of the theorists, objects – and in particular art works – are
all either annexed to the empire of signs, or brought back to the constructions of
the actors, when they are not left to the specialists and their devices. Without a full
theory of mediation, objects cannot be conceived in social terms.
Chapter 4
The Social History of Art:
Reinserting the Works into Society
Generally, accounts and summaries of the whole history of music are more or less
limited to a series of names of composers, as though there had been no interpreters,
concerts, or any sort of musical events.
A. Schaeffner, Essais de musicologie et autres fantaisies, 1980, p. 40
As the sociology of art started to focus on the world of actors, it traded a system of
objective external causes, which was initially global but later increasingly partial,
and decided on by the sociologist, for a local constructivist model where, on the
contrary, only the reasons which could be found among the actors themselves
would be deemed to be the reasons for an activity. The social history of art and
the history of art pure and simple have also converged towards a very similar
point, which the phrase ‘art world’ encapsulates. Both are disciplines focusing
on art and its productions as their object at the expense of social theory, and they
have chosen to devote themselves to the production of a large number of case
studies on a great variety of periods, objects, individuals and milieux, rather than
dwell on their modes of explication. Listing these case studies would be beside
the point: they would not lend themselves easily to an inventory, considering their
authors’ empirically minded and erudite modus operandi, as well as their distaste
for generalisations. Instead, I shall look at what distinguished the history and the
social history of art from each other, and then brought them together in order
to draw on the spectacular restoration of the mediations of art that their method
made possible, before attempting to set out the theoretical implications of this
restoration, on the basis of a number of key works.
The growing number of mediators now increasingly evoked by the sociology
of art as being involved, from the art works to the audiences, and from the art
world’s internal relationships to the distribution of art works and the collective
mechanisms of the attribution of their value, had already been masterfully
foregrounded by the pas de deux of the history and social history of art. Initially,
the positions of these two disciplines on the status of art works were at opposite
ends of the spectrum: whereas the history of art sought to recognise them more
fully and establish their status, the social history of art wished to focus on their
external determinations. However, the gap between their positions narrowed as
the types of causes which they mobilised started to overlap. Although initially the
causes invoked by social historians of art were general, external and explicative,
while those which art historians summoned were specific, internal and implicative,
they ended up equally embroiled in intersecting mediations, where none could be
extricated from the network without relying on the others, and all had to be clearly
attributed to particular actors in the art world. The phrase ‘art world’ does not
imply interdisciplinary fuzziness: Becker’s phrase had already helped to bridge
the gap between the social history of art and its sociology. Its implicit methodical
imperative makes it a provocative sociological concept: it refuses to allow the
causes unveiled by the sociologist to displace those which the actors attribute
to themselves. However, this phrase comes very naturally to artistic disciplines,
where one will not be surprised to discover that it has a long history. Becker
borrows it from Canvases and Careers, where the Whites use it in more or less
the same sense but without defining it: ‘The canvases and careers of individuals
change and are changed by the institutions peculiar to the art world’ (1993, p. xxi).
But M. Wackernagel had already used this phrase before them in one of the first
great works of the social history of art.1 In the original German, the phrase is
‘Lebensraum’, while in French, translators resort to Taine’s notion of ‘milieu’,
which evokes the vital space that organisms need in order to develop:2 indeed,
this notion of ‘world’ is to be understood in a very similar sense to the world that
interactionism describes, as opposed to the ‘lived world’ of phenomenology.3
The disciplinary affiliations of research done in the history and social history
of art eventually became difficult to distinguish. When Haskell, one of the greatest
figures of British art history, outlines the various perspectives through which he
proposes to study the ‘mutations of taste’, his programme coincides exactly with
the programme that any good work on the social history art might set itself:
the availability or otherwise to the collector or connoisseur of recognised

masterpieces; the impact of contemporary art; the religious or political loyalties
that may condition certain aesthetic standpoints; the effects of public and
private collections; the impression made by new techniques of reproduction and
language in spreading fresh beliefs about art and artists. (1976/80, pp. 6–7)
1
L.L. Schücking used it even earlier in a seminal work on literature, which focused
not so much on the work itself as on the work understood as the ‘product of a complex
process in which a variety of forces – some ideological, some highly material – contend
with one another and ultimately produce something that is itself far from immune to the
actions of chance’ (1931/66, p. vii).
2
Gombrich returns to this theme in order to conceptualise the interaction between
painting and a milieu. Proposing an alternative to determinism, he associates images with
their ‘ecological niche’ (1999, p. 10), giving precedence over actual artistic works to grand
themes, such as mythological concerns, ideologies of progress, or scientific problems.
3
See A. Schutz (1951), as well as Menger’s preface to Les Mondes de l’art, the
French translation of Becker’s Art worlds. Focusing on music as a medium, Schutz focuses
on the internal – as opposed to external – experience of duration in order to explain the
transition which occurs in the musical experience between the confrontation of subject and
world, and the institution of an ‘us’. According to him, the duality of subject and world is
not empirically cancelled by the need for mediations, but is on the contrary experienced in
the present, and conceptualised through speculative intuition.
The Social History of Art: Reinserting the Works into Society 103
What matters to us here is that although historians and social historians of art initially
clung fast to either aesthetic or sociologistic ideologies, respectively disputing
each other with a fierceness which only confirmed the seminal importance that
they attributed to the never-ending feud between these discourses, they eventually
managed to reconcile their differences by invoking a larger inventory of possible
causes, ranging from the most internal to the most external. They also achieved
something even more important: their lengthy and erudite investigations led them
to show with increasing precision the work that actors themselves undertake in
order to produce their world.
Repopulating the Art World
This evolution followed a double trend. Social historians of art started by

mobilising heavy-handed general causes which were independent of art
and which they selected themselves: the economy, demography, a dominant
ideology, the elite’s representation of its vision of the world. Later, they turned
to specific intermediary causes and – although always warily – to intellectual
tools borrowed from sociology: the tastes and cultural practices of the elites,
the precise mechanisms of investments in art, the power struggle between
sponsors and artists, the different types of markets for and access to the works,
the way institutions operate, the birth of academies, the organisation of the
artistic professions.4 As for historians of art, once they got over their initial
focus on exceptional art works (which was reductionist both in terms of how
these great works were selected and of the scope of their investigations, which
were limited to the works themselves), they started to stray into a world which
offered wider attractions. Instead of confining themselves to exceptional works,
they turned to quantitative, demographic, or economic analysis, and explored
milieux and living conditions, the law and institutions, minor works, and the
average works which were actually produced and distributed.5 This brought the
variegated multiplicity of the mediators of art into their field of vision:
4
Making a linear survey of contracts, orders and commissions, associations, salaries,
types of artisans, the place of artists in society, as well as art supplies, materials and
techniques, and the consumption of art, the series of conference proceedings edited by
Barral i Altet (1986/88/90) gives a good picture of the range of the research carried out
by social historians of art, as well as of the relatively narrow scope of their arguments.
Overall, these published papers justify Bourdieu’s critique of the social history of art’s
obsession with the problem of the relationship between the artisan and the artist, ‘raising yet
again, as has been done, obsessively, in the social history of art, the question of when and
how the artist emerged from the status of the craftsman’ (1993b, p. 148). Instead, Bourdieu
advocated ‘describing the economic and social conditions of the constitution of an artistic
field’ (ibid.).
5
See for example Montias: ‘As opposed to art historians who reluctantly concede that
it is important to look at minor artists as well as major players, not only does Montias show
• Sponsors and patrons,6 the state, merchants,7 and collectors:8 all those
who help to channel the demand for art works and make artists aware of
this demand.
• Studios,9 texts and treatises, and academies:10 all the structuring agents who
seek to pass on knowledge and skills, while competing with each other
in order to preserve their own monopoly in producing the norms of the
artistic milieu.
• Critics, salons, museums, curators, concert organisers, umanisti, great art
lovers and other gate keepers of art: acting as representatives of art for
audiences, and as representatives of audiences for the artists, their capacity
to manage these interfaces with finesse puts them in a privileged position
to define tastes.
Along with the increasing professionalisation of the artistic disciplines, the

developing role of the mediators of art (in the narrow sense of the intermediaries
who play a key role in the orders placed for art works, as well as in their
production, evaluation and distribution) constituted the other facet of research in
the social history of art. As the Whites develop and interrelate both of these themes
in Canvases and Careers, it is easy to understand why this work retrospectively
appeared seminal to historians and to sociologists of art. All of these mediators
ended up invading the stage of the history of art, social or otherwise, as complex
historical figures fleshed out roles which the social history of art initially only
created as a matter of principle, in order to represent larger social forces. Baxandall
took this approach to its material extreme by giving the status of mediators of art
to the very pigments used in Quattrocento paintings. I am alluding here to his
treatment of ultramarine blue:11 while exhibiting both a religious imperative and the
sponsor’s power, it will eventually function as a vector for the future recognition
of great works, because this pigment stands the test of time comparatively well –
i.e. as a direct consequence of the painter’s decision to opt for a quality product,
rather than as a result of either deliberate calculation or pure chance.
interest in the fate of minor masters, but he is even curious about those whose works are so
minor that they are nameless, whether in terms of author, title, or subject’! (V.L. Zolberg’s
review of Artists and Artisans in Delft, in Moulin (ed.) 1989, p. 482).
6
See for example Antal (1948), Gombrich (1963/78), Haskell (1963/80), Schapiro
(1964, 1982).
7
See for example Haskell (1976/80).
8
Alsop (1982), Pomian (1987), Schnapper (1988); cf. infra, pp. 122ff.
9
See S. Alpers (1988) on Rembrandt’s studio, cf. infra, pp. 143–8.
10
Boime (1971), and N. Heinich’s (1981) doctoral dissertation, which follows in the
footsteps of F.A. Yates (1947); in the area of music, see A. Cohen (1981) and H.F. Cohen
(1984).
11
Baxandall (1972, ch. 1). Similarly, he promoted lime wood as a ‘positive medium’
in his work on German Renaissance wood sculptors (1980, p. 48).
The two disciplines retained distinct sensibilities, despite finding a meeting

point. The history of art tended to focus on mediators who were individual, closely
connected to the production of art, specific and linked to the art world,12 because
it spontaneously followed the constructivist programme born of the perspective
dictated by the notion of ‘art worlds’.13 In contrast, the social history of art
preferred to emphasise mediators who were collective, closely connected with
the appreciation and consumption of art, and those more general and external to
the art world, from the tastes and practices of the ruling classes and the bourgeois
elites,14 to wider tendencies such as the birth of geometrical notions of space,
the rationalisation and development of visual techniques and capabilities, the
consequences of writing and the changing functions of art, the rise of the middle
classes, the new decorative demands of bourgeois homes, and the beginnings of
speculation in art.
The Social History of Art, or How to Relate Art back to the Social?
Several paths were open to the social history of art. One way to emphasise the
production of art while maintaining a social focus was to examine the image of the
artist and reconstruct the representations which go hand in hand with art, giving it
its ideological weight. Originally published in German in 1934, Kurtz’s and Kris’
The Image of the Artist (1981) is the model for this approach: the innumerable
narratives about artists which represent them as magical heroes are mythical and
‘reflect a universal human response to the mysterious magic of image-making’,
as Gombrich says in his Preface (1981, p. xii). In all these narratives, artists are
gifted from childhood, an extraordinary event discloses their talent, and they are
endowed with a hallucinatory capacity for deceit. Their ‘genius’ has mysterious
origins. It is believed to be predestined, to have an almost ‘external existence’
(p. 59), to be a god-given power which is much greater than its human beneficiary,
12
Although several art historians have adopted this focus on an individual character,
they were often isolated, or else this only constituted a marginal portion of their work, as
in Panofsky’s Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis (1946–79); cf. infra. For a
more recent example, see Ginzburg (1985/2000): cf. infra pp. 131–5 for an analysis of
Ginzburg’s Enigma of Piero, an extraordinary whodunit of a history book.
13
Dreaming of what form an ideal social history of art might take, Gombrich writes:
‘If by the “social history” of art we mean an account of the changing material conditions
under which Art was commissioned and created in the past, such a history is one of the
desiderata of our field’ (1978, p. 86). He then sets out the programme which he would
like to see this rival branch adopt. Focusing on ‘the minutiae of social existence’ (ibid.), it
would include only its most internal factors: ‘… the recorded rules and statutes of lodges
and guilds, the development of posts such as that of the peintre du roi, the emergence of
public exhibitions or the exact curricula and methods of art teaching’, (and) the role of these
“humanist advisers” of whom we have heard a good deal of late’ (ibid.).
14
See for example Antal (1948) or Crow (1985).
whom it turns into an ‘alter deus’ or ‘divino artista’ (p. 61): ‘Thus, even in the
histories of comparatively modern artists, we find biographical themes that can be
traced back, point by point, to the god- and hero-filled world before the dawn of
history’ (p. 12). Far from merely restoring the image of the artist and denouncing
the ideology of talent, the book presents a psychoanalytically inspired and active
theory of the artist as a socially and collectively constructed hero. There is an
agonistic dimension to this heroicisation of the artist: challenging the gods, the
artist provokes their revenge, and, like them, has an exuberant sex life and is
forever caught at the centre of deadly rivalries. Artists also defy society, however:
they dupe their audience or ordinary men, who fear them as sorcerers because
‘works of art … were taken for living beings’ (p. 71). The work ends with the idea
that artists eventually obey a self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘the artist was singled out by
God to execute a particular work or destined for an especially important mission,
thereby enabling him to carry it out’ (p. 56). However, as with most interpretations
of art which see it as a form of social exorcism, the argument centres on the ‘image’
of the artist at the expense of his work or the art he produces. Although this book’s
focus on a mythical analysis of art undoubtedly brings us closer to a number of
fundamental anthropological truths, nevertheless there is a price to pay, it may
overlook art itself. Distracting us from the actual audiences of art, the ethnologist’s
discourse which presides over the argument overall does not so much postulate
the existence of social actors and distinct products as it conceives of society as an
actor playing with its representations.
The First Trump Card of the Social History of Art: the Turn to the Audience
Yet, the historical analysis of the audience, and markets, of art is of such
theoretical importance that it demands to be singled out from the list of social
causes inventoried by the social history of art. This analysis brought together
approaches which located the supreme cause of art in the audience – aligning
themselves with a determinist version of the sociology of culture, they turned
the reception of art works into an absolute principle for their interpretation – and
approaches which remained affiliated to the history of art by simply seeing the
audience as one mediator of art among others.15 They proceeded to analyse the
evolution of exhibition or concert programmes, as well as the locations where they
took place, and the people who took part in them, whether at Court or in salons
15
See for example the stance which Baxandall takes on the role which the market
played for the wooden sculptures of Renaissance Germany: neither sacrilegious, nor a last
resort, it is ‘simply one medium through which a society can translate both general facts
about itself and … preoccupations about art into a brief the artist can understand’ (1980,
p. 95). His analysis is very flexible and dynamic, rather than deterministic: the artist can
pick and choose between the different suggestions on this ‘brief’, ignoring some, returning
to others and combining them with his own ideas, etc.
between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Art historians could at last
address audiences as a real issue, now that they had acknowledged that it is not
sufficient to look at the art works and the milieu in which they were produced,
and avoided the trap of a simplistic explanation of all the art created between the
sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries by the long ascent of the bourgeoisie. And
of course, their focus on the audience – understood as a new field of study rather
than as the answer to all their questions – forced them to confront a hybrid and
unfamiliar object. Elusive and difficult to analyse empirically, it ranged from the
specific modalities of the reception of art – its spaces, its means, and its markets –
to deciphering the effects of art on different social groups on the basis of fragile
traces which eluded clear-cut interpretation.
Economic analysis made a convincing appearance in these contextualised
investigations of taste in J.M. Montias’ work on painting in seventeenth-century
Delft (1982), which is emblematic both of this new turn and of what this method
brought to the social history of art. In this monograph, Montias provides an overall
picture of painting across the various strata of the population by systematically
investigating the artistic/artisanal system of production in a particular city through
a turn to arithmetical averages and statistics, which allow him to inventory the
paintings that people really had in their homes, rather than simply the exceptional
works that art history retrospectively singled out. His attention to contracts,
archival material and tax registers also helps him to restore the continuum of
decorative products, and of the demographics, status and corporate and economic
organisation of the artists and artisans who made them. Looking at the marriages
artists contracted, as well as the expense they invested in establishing their careers,
Montias also challenges simplistic notions about guilds, showing that artists
already knew that they were not artisans: painters and printers belonging to the
same corporation did not mingle. In a way which is emblematic of the composite,
real and partial types of causalities which the new social history of art accepted,
Montias concludes on a series of floating causes, before wondering about the
conjunction of factors which made it possible to create an art that would endure:
‘The favorable conjunction of supply and demand factors that I have described
accounts in large parts for the creation, during a span scarcely exceeding one
generation, of a great deal of art that has withstood the test of time’ (p. 332).16
16
Some studies seek to give a broader account of the evolution of the modalities of
the reception of art. Bonfait’s (1989) critique of T. Crow’s (1985) argument suggests that
Crow uses the audience like something of a trump card, rationalising it to give a highly
political vision of it, at the risk of turning it into a rather anachronistic ‘public opinion’.
This perspective comes close to those of Griswold (1987) and M. Vovelle (1981), as well as
of H.-J. Martin’s and R. Chartier’s (1982–86) new history of reading, by bringing cultural
history to bear on cultural practices and challenging the anachronistic interpretation of
surviving indicators on these practices, such as the Bibliothèque bleue, or public readings;
cf. also Chartier (1987), Martin (1988).
As for the more traditional research programme which considers that art
works indicate the cultural habits of a period, it also evolved on both poles of its
spectrum, whether it focused on the overall frame of the signification of art works,
or on case studies examining the reception of this or that artist, work, or trend. It
is easy to understand why Panofsky’s comments on Abbot Suger17 emblematised
the approach of the social history of art: focusing on a fascinating character, the
great art historian’s far-reaching analysis of the relationships between power,
theory, religion and art, harnessed the themes of the mediators of art, and of the
different categories of its reception. However, rather than comparing Panofsky’s
text to later works on patrons and sponsors, which focused on the interactions of
artists and decision-makers, it would be less anachronistic to assimilate it to a
more traditional intellectual history approached through the prism of art works.
Panofsky was interested in Suger – as indeed Bourdieu in Panofsky – less out of
concern for Suger’s role as a ‘mediator’ (p. 11), than because the Abbot allowed
him to introduce the habitus of the scholastic tradition in terms of a ‘generative
grammar’18 shared by the pastoral and architectural projects of Gothic cathedrals.
Panofsky himself put it very well:
in the period between about 1130–1140 and about 1270, we can observe, it
seems to me, a connection between Gothic art and scholasticism which is more
complete than a mere “parallelism” and yet more general than those individual
(and very important) “influences” which are inevitably exerted on painters,
sculptors or architects by erudite advisors. (1976, p. 20)
Noting their perfect chronological concordance, Panofsky’s socio-historical

reading underlines the internalisation of these classifications through a ‘habit-
forming force’. Hardly needing to consult the text, Bourdieu is able to use it in his
postface to discover that it counters the positivistic naivety of facts which can only
be interpreted because they are understood through the interpretive tools which
have created them. He argues that the text seeks the ‘geometric space of all the
symbolical forms of abstraction which are specific to a society’ (postface, p. 135).
This work does bear on the ‘audience’, in the strong sense of the term, since it
touches on the formation of the categories of the reception of forms. A ‘mental
habit’ is not disseminated through ‘the conceptual content of the doctrine’ but
by its ‘modus operandi’ (p. 89), which seeks to reconcile reason and faith. Thus,
17
Bourdieu translated Panofsky’s text into French and presented it (1967); cf. also
Yates (1975).
18
Bourdieu proposes this retrospective theoretical account of Panofsky’s work in his
long postface to this book (p. 152). It is clearly possible to read Panofsky in one of two
ways depending on whether one interprets his famous iconology in the light of a history
of art which was still very formal, or of a social history of art bent on the categories of the
reception of art. (In fact, in France, Panofsky’s works are published by Gallimard and les
Éditions de Minuit depending on where they stand on this issue!)
Panofsky – according to Bourdieu – does not so much argue that faith is mediated
by architecture, or contrarywise architecture by the work of characters such as
Suger, as he emphasises the structural homologies between faith and reason. ‘Just
as traditional scholastic thought is dominated by the principle of manifestatio, so
Gothic architecture is dominated … by the “principle of transparency”’ (p. 102).
The hall church of the late Gothic period creates a ‘space that is determined and
impenetrable from the outside but indeterminate and penetrable from the inside’
(ibid.), reflecting either the annihilation of reason in faith (mysticism) or their
complete dissociation (nominalism) – ‘two attitudes [which] are expressed’ in
these churches. Thus traditional scholastic thought, which separates faith and
reason but proclaims that the content of faith ‘must remain clearly discernable’,
corresponds to ‘the traditional Gothic architecture [which] separates its internal
volume from external space while demanding its auto-projection on itself, as it
were, through its enveloping structure’ (p. 103). For ‘men steeped in scholastics’
(p. 112), ‘the whole set of small columns, arches, buttresses, traceries, pinnacles,
ornaments is a form of self-analysis and is architecturarily self-explanatory, just
as the familiar set of parts, distinctions, questions and articles is a form of self-
analysis and is rationally self-explanatory’.
Of course, in the book, these ideological matrices pre-date the scholastic and
architectural systems which express them: their precedence and common pedagogic
intent are the reason for the perfect correspondence between these two constructs.
Basing his analysis on a concrete example, Panofsky nevertheless produced one
of the first convincing arguments on the reality and the depth of the links between
art and society. The precision of the relationships which he discovered, and the
deep intuition which he had of the key role which mediators – be they human like
Abbot Suger, material like columns and transepts, or conceptual like the grammar
of reason which scholastics gave form to – played in these relationships, mean
that his interpretation is potentially more far-reaching than the intellectual history
it is based on.
The Second Trump Card of the Social History of Art: The Patron
These historians paved the way for this turn to the audience and the reception of
art, and the more ‘socially’-minded of art historians – scholars such as Baxandall
in Painting as Experience (1972, cf. infra, pp. 127–30), or Alpers in The Art of
Describing (1983) – followed in their steps. However, there was another trend in the
social interpretation of art, which Panofsky also prefigured. Focusing on art works,
this trend did not seek to decipher their signification immediately – like aesthetic
interpretations which ignore social questions – but rather to analyse the actors,
procedures, and institutions which assign them their significations and functions.
Few social historians of art took this path, however. Antal’s work on fourteenth-
century Florentine painting promises to follow this programme, but fails to do
so.19 Antal conceives the relationship between art and society on the most external
mode possible: he sketches out a rough economic, social and political history of
the period – including surveys of ideologies, religion, philosophy, education and
literature – before accounting for the history of the arts through the analysis of
the subject matter, styles, and position of artists. He bases their relationship on
external correspondences, which constrains him to give a simplistic account of
social classification in terms of higher or lower strata of the bourgeoisie, and to
account equally unsatisfactorily for stylistic characteristics: his traditional aesthetic
appraisal of styles is combined with moralising – harsh, rigorist, superficial –
assessments depending on their relationship with this or that class.20
In spite of the danger which Antal’s argument illustrates all too well, of
confining the analysis to a perfect mediator, who is supposed to represent the
final, real cause of the whole process by incarnating on his own the influence of
society on art, the attention which these historians paid to both the audiences and
the sponsors of art contained the seeds of a social analysis of art in which actors
produce their world. Historians did not wait for sociology to do this. As early as
1938, M. Wackernagel’s work on the World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist
developed a radically new and wide-ranging argument, as his subtitle Projects
and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market makes clear. Prefiguring the reconciliation
of historians and social historians of art, Wackernagel suggested that his work
complemented the research of his mentor, H. Wölfflin. Declaring himself ‘in no
way in opposition to the Renaissance research of Wölfflin [… whose insights] he
seeks rather to supplement from another point of view’ (1981, p. 14), he writes
that he seeks to add to such analyses of the works by restoring ‘a world from
which the formal as well as the spiritual nature of [Florentine artistic] creations in
a certain sense derives’ (ibid., p. 15). He restricts the task of the social history to
restoring a context to art by ‘transfer[ring] the concrete factual material … back
19
He is distracted from this programme by casuistic considerations about the ‘lower,
middle and upper’ bourgeoisies, which he relates rather bluntly to the style of Giotto and
his successors: ‘After Giotto, painting was no longer capable of Giotto’s severe rationalist
conception and compactness of composition, nor of maintaining his achievements in
spatial clarity and body-construction – since the general situation was now no longer
unambiguously favourable to the upper bourgeoisie. On the other hand, painting, despite
this, did not become consistently spiritual or gothicising, for again circumstances were
not propitious enough for the middle and lower bourgeoisies, still far in Florence from
ideological independence’ (1948, pp. 172–3).
20
Launching the debate on the very possibility of a social history of art, A. Hauser’s
work (1951) is built on the equally disastrous combination of a wealth of details lacking
any theoretical framework, and the attribution of the progress of art to a single, reiterated,
cause: the rise of the bourgeoisie. As a result his entire argument hinges on the relationship
of artists to their patrons, although this unfortunately does not lead him to investigate
their historical role. Instead, forced to look for the lackeys of the bourgeoisie in order to
defend his thesis, he reductively turns these sponsors into the servants of the interests of
the upper classes.
into its original spatial setting and function’ (p. 5). Although this terse formula
narrowed the theoretical gap between Wackernagel’s work and the social history
of art as Antal conceives it, this differential had major consequences in his case.
His stance is indeed confined to a sociology of conditions: he seeks to shed light on
the ‘preconditions and circumstances’ of artistic production (p. 14). Nevertheless,
the descriptive work which he undertakes in order to restore these mediations
is remarkable: as well as emphasising the importance of commissions – i.e. the
‘great projects’ of the Renaissance (the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Maria
Novella) – orders and patrons, studios and the market, he draws attention to the
role of religion, guilds, demographics, the organisation of production, and even
audiences. In other words, the restoration of the mediators in the history of art
did not proceed chronologically. Wackernagel anticipated this process with his
sensitivity to the heterogeneous, partial and interlocking links between human
beings, relationships, associations and institutions: he only omitted the techniques
and the works. However, Wackernagel’s theoretical carelessness, disguised by
his ongoing focus on conditions, confined the mediations which he presented to
a passive role. He devotes only four precious but limited pages to the market,
for instance, providing a detailed account of modes of payment and giving an
indication of prices.
In spite of these inadequacies, Wackernagel’s work traced the direction in
which historical and sociological approaches to art would meet. It allowed art
historians to trace the many uses of art with a new set of actors and tools, and
helped sociologists of art to move on from generalisations on social stratification
while forcing them to take stock of the diversity and ingeniousness of the actors
themselves who, long before sociology existed, had attempted to define art
objects, as well as the conditions of their distribution and durability, and even the
various modes of their appreciation.21 After controversial beginnings marked by
a tendency to generalise and to borrow from Marxism mostly its weaknesses, the
social history of art could now do more than bravely confront the erudite tradition
21
These frames extended seamlessly from the most general strategies a society might
deploy towards its heritage to the most concrete measures for its enhancement. This is the
case for example in M. Akrich’s (1986a, b) work on R. van der Weyden’s Polyptych, in the
Hospices de Beaune. Tourists wishing to admire this painting must cross several doorways
and tread all the carpets leading to the room where the celebrated panels are located, before
they can meet with the culminating point of this trail: a huge magnifying glass mounted on
sliding rails. The room has been entirely refitted the better to fulfil its function as the setting
for van der Weyden’s work, which the darkness of the Chapel prevented. In a spectacular
reversal, the Hôtel-Dieu has become the architectural antechamber for the painting which
decorated it. This set up strikingly condenses the path followed by the history of art. While
the spectacular vision revealed by this display is rather monstrous – resembling a large,
opaque, eye, the magnifying glass gives the gaze an almost voyeuristic quality – it has
nevertheless allowed the inhabitants of Beaune to keep their treasure while allowing it to
receive the honours of aesthetic recognition, instead of seeing its consecration coincide
with … its departure for the Louvre!
of art history, and it became easier to move across the two disciplines. The careful
attention which the history of art paid to restoring the historical dimensions of
artistic production was now applied to all the actors of the art world rather than
merely to the works, putting an end to the curses which the guardians of the temple
of art, and the infidels who denounced the cult of art as a disguised cult of social
domination, launched at each other from either side of the ramparts of belief.
The Institution of Music: The Politicisation of the Social History of Art
In the area of music, the focus also moved towards its production. Social
musicologists sought to restore the work which led to the constitution of the
musical field and investigated the way in which institutions codify, stabilise,
channel, transmit and distort music. As well as focusing on institutions, in the
strict sense of the term, and on their impact on music, this approach also examined
musical professions, training organisations and markets. The British social history
of music led the way.22 Several musicologists had already incorporated ideas
pertaining to the social history of art into their arguments without thinking that
they were revolutionising traditional musicology,23 but these borrowings remained
fragmentary and could not easily be linked to an evolution of musical contents.24
22
In France, it was the ‘Séminaire d’histoire sociale de la musique’ run by H. Dufourt
and J.-M. Fauquet at the CID IRCAM/CNRS (1987, 1991, 1994) which led the way.
23
In La Vie des musiciens de Paris au temps de Mazarin (1976), for example,
C. Massip undertakes a ‘social study’ of salaries, modes of training, official duties, the
organisation of corporate associations, and the relationship between the city and the Court.
She also examines the ‘Community of instrument players’ which saw its statutes revised
in 1658, in order to describe the problems and the ‘social condition’ of the 800 to 850
musicians who lived in Paris in 1650 (pp. 87ff), spread across the Court, the Church and
corporate associations, and shed light on the process which was to lead to the constitution
of a set of elite professionals, at odds with the traditions of both Church and street music.
24
Under the influence of both Weber and McLuhan, an Anglo-American
musicological trend focused on the opposition between oral and written musics in order to
link the rise of the bourgeoisie to the birth of tonality, via the rise to power of clerks and
the loss of freedom entailed by the move from the collective dynamics of oral music to the
visual control of notes. In their critique of musicology, Shepherd et al. (1977) argue that
its tautological application to music of categories which it contributed to create makes it
difficult to conceive of music in social terms. However, their binary and exclusive treatment
of the Great Divide between oral and written cultures precludes any historical investigation
of music: they oppose life, the collectivity, dynamism, resistance – and modal music – to
death, elites, bureaucrats, control, fixity, power – and tonal music. Working under the aegis
of Walter Benjamin (1968), Leppert and McClary edited a collective book (1987) which
also aspired to writing a ‘critical history’ of the ‘connections between the substance of
music and social values’ (p. xiii) ‘within a cultural context organised by institutions and
practices’ (Mowitt 1987, p. 173).
As for British scholars, they systematically covered the major themes of the
history of music:
• The development of the musical profession, from corporations to unions,

as well as the evolution of its social recognition, demographics, training
and professional grouping.25
• The specific problems arising from the evolution of instruments: these are
excellent historical markers of the uses and distribution of music, as well
as of the music business,26 even though this type of problem cannot be so
easily related to a detailed survey of changes in instrumental workmanship,
the rich history of which has been highlighted by musicologists.27
25
Cf. Ehrlich (1985) for a rich and evocative history of the British ‘Musicians’
Union’. Peacock’s and Weir’s investigation of the history of copyrights in the United
Kingdom since 1905 placed this history in a sharper economic perspective by linking it to
the constitution of the musical market. More interested in the organisation of a market than
in the application of the market’s deterministic laws, they focus on the material specificity
of music, which lasts only so long, where it is costly to exclude non-payers, and where
performances are difficult to isolate – hence both the need for a mediator (the score, the
disk) allowing musicians to be paid and the risk of piracy, and finally the decisive advantage
of mechanical means over paper for earning money from music: ‘The composer has been
successfully delivered by the Society (the Performing Rights Society, founded in 1914)
from the age of sheet music into the age of electronic music’ (1975, p. 146).
26
C. Ehrlich (1976) traces the social history of the piano, ‘this king of instruments
which since the nineteenth century has played a central part in the triumph of the virtuoso
interpreter, the domestic playing of music, and the dissemination of the taste for, and
familiarity with, art music’ (Menger, review of Ehrlich (1985) in Moulin (ed.) 1989,
pp. 468–72). R. Lenoir suggests that the entire landscape of the legitimate perception,
playing, and composition of music was altered by the evolution of the piano. As this
evolution itself resulted from the many aesthetic, technical, and economic struggles and
rivalries between different musicians and manufacturers, he hopes to explain national
stylistic divergences in terms of the workmanship choices that prevailed in different
countries rather than assenting mechanically to the notion of ‘national traditions’ (1979.
p. 82).
27
Cf. Vibrations no. 2 (1985), or the articles on unusual instruments (T. Gérard’s
piece on the ophicléide, and G. Guillard’s on the pedal piano) in Revue internationale de
musique française no. 13 (1984): there is nothing like the lame ducks of history to challenge
the wishful thinking of the social history of art. The transition from the harpsichord to the
pianoforte has often been explained (cf. de Place (1986)) in terms ranging from social
determinism (the fall of the nobility) to technical determinism (the progress of sound,
although Voltaire called the pianoforte a boilermaker’s instrument in a 1774 letter to the
Marquise du Deffand!), not to mention E. Good’s thesis that this transition was radically non-
determined. Challenging the determination of excessively linear causes in his discussion of
the supposed weaknesses of the sound of the harpsichord, Good bluntly remarks that ‘no
one particularly needed to think of it’ (1982, p. 29). The history of the piano which he traces
is much more chaotic than Ehrlich’s. Criticising the ‘manifest inadequacies’ of Ehrlich’s
• Finally, the evolution of the consumption of music, from its ritual, religious,
and political uses to the slow development of music as a consumer product,
and its functions in national, ethnic, or political representation.28
Finally, the ‘political’ interpretation of art – a risky genre if ever there was one –
was particularly successful with music, in particular nineteenth-century French
opera (Fulcher 1987/2002). Fulcher’s argument seeks to provide a less simplistic
vision of the place of politics in music: countering the usual perception of French
‘grand opera’ as a gaudy, showy genre which is defined by the market and simply
caters to the tastes of the bourgeoisie, presenting it as ‘an art form concentrated
on ‘its “effect”’ (p. 64). J. Fulcher shows that, on the contrary, opera ‘was subtly
used as a tool of the state’ (p. 2) and that its political function was never limited
to what the authorities intended: ‘The Opéra was palpably a dangerous realm, one
of contestation over the voice of the “people”… potentially a realm of challenge
to political authority’ (p. 8). Focusing on the troubled fate of three specific works
(Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots, La Muette de Portici), Fulcher shows that
although they were each assigned a particular political function, they failed to
fulfil it in all three cases, turning the Opéra into a space of political contestation.
The politicisation of an opera was not predetermined. Instead, this was
achieved ‘by reference’ (p. 201): long-awaited, interpreted, commented on – and
in this way politicised – a performance became the site of a struggle between
‘legitimate authority’ and the ‘contestation’ of this pretension to legitimacy
(p. 33) ‘that at moments functioned in the interests of power and at others acted
against it’ (p. 202). Although the state used the opera to speak ‘in the people’s
name’, it also risked exhibiting the contradiction between its use of the opera
and its actual political action – and therefore its contradiction of the voice of
the people, present in the room: ‘At the work’s (La Muette de Portici) premiere,
the audience’s construal and response took it (the Opéra) by surprise … and …
seised the authorities unprepared’ (p. 36). Performances were not external pretexts
for political expression: they were its medium and they staged it, at the risk of
‘alert[ing] the audience to contradictions between cultural rhetoric and political
fact’ (p. 46). Refusing the straightforward causes which the social history of art
all too often settles for, allows Fulcher to rethink our analysis of the political. As
binary oppositions (e.g. between innovative Steinways and conservative Érards), Giraffes,
Black Dragoons and Other Pianos (the title alone is a manifesto!) exhibits the art historian’s
distrust of the over-generalisations of social historians of art. Focusing on the history of
specific pianos, he illuminates the ‘lag between invention and acceptance’ (p. viii).
28
The parallel rise of the urban middle classes and modern forms of musical
consumption (in concerts, and then in the media) allowed H. Raynor (1972, 1976) and
W. Weber (1975) to analyse the birth of bourgeois audiences in terms of a Weberian notion
of progress – the rationalisation of a mode of listening – by measuring the attendance at
musical events, evaluating the criticisms and commentaries they received, and investigating
how leading groups of music lovers defined new forms of musical consumption.
she explains, accepting open-ended and reciprocal causalities makes it possible to

trace a ‘cultural history’ which shows ‘how grand opera was implicated in a social
and cultural context – how it arose within larger structures and in turn reacted back
finally upon them’ (pp. 9–10).
Being ‘a tool or symbol of political compromise’ (p. 165), the Opéra was an
‘intermediate institution’ (p. 202). As a result, its analysis should ’selectively’
resort to its ‘performance context and interpretive frame’ (p. 203): depending on
individual cases, understanding the music will depend more or less on this context
and frame:
At its most powerful, grand opera was integrally engaged in a direct, provocative
dialogue with the real or actual world in France … If all historical drama makes a
pretence of “engaging with reality”, then this is especially true of the politicised
stage of the Opéra in these years … texts like those of French opera … gained
their most complete vitality in the context of a specific social function or use.
(pp. 202–3)
Unfortunately, the invocation of such open-ended and selective causes is very

unusual. Instead, the social history of music is usually constrained by a resolutely
external and partial model of the relationship between society and music, which
E.D. Mackerness’ words exemplify: ‘The main intention of this volume has been
to suggest the nature of non-musical forces … which determine why at certain
periods specific kinds of musical activities come into prominence and others do
not’ (1964, p. 284). A double restriction, typical of social history, imposes a priori
limitations on his investigation and inventory of ‘the social movements which have
influenced the development of musical taste and custom’ (p. iv):29 Mackerness
conceives of the impact of society on music, but the reverse does not occur to him.
And he also privileges the reception of music over its production, as though taste
were the only natural object of the social history of art. This approach evokes the
restricted model deployed by anthropologists such as Merriam. In this model, the
social history of music has nothing to say about the large and universal backdrop of
music: a given society will pick and choose various elements from this background,
and these chosen elements alone are the object of social investigations of music.
Is the Social History of Art Ready at last to Accept Active Actors?
When one surveys the social history of art with an eye on the transformation of
the – increasingly active and actor-centred – types of causes and causalities which
it summons in order to link art and society, it is clear that the objects and methods
29
Although heterogeneous, this list nevertheless rather originally includes the
audience, the notion of ‘the people’, education, progress, commercial developments, and
machines, especially the radio.
of this discipline have come closer to those of the history of art, once it moved
beyond its aestheticism, cult of masterpieces, and focus on the production of art
(as opposed to its producers). Conversely, art historians had no difficulty using
their immense erudition to restore the most unexpected mediations of art in minute
detail, and quickly went from restoring mainly the mediators who participated
in the creation of art works to restoring also those who were responsible for
their distribution and transformations across time and space. As often quoted by
sociologists as by historians, the work of the Whites (1965/93) was a milestone
in this reconciliation. Its overall argument describes the transition from a world
ruled by academies, academicism, and the state to a world regulated by middle
men, merchants and critics. The Whites explore precise and specific intermediary
variables: focusing on the Salon des Indépendants, they investigate the evolution
of institutions and the organisation of the art world, art schools and the training
of artists, as well as the relationship painters had with exhibitions, commissions
and orders, critics, and merchants. Always offsetting their analyses of paintings
and reputations against accounts of the flow of money, they highlight the impact
of the increasing number of painters, and emphasise the effects of changes in the
materials and techniques used by artists, as well as in the arrangements for their
training. These traits mean that their work is emblematic of a social history of
art which specifically examines the art world under scrutiny, repopulating it with
its mediators rather than depopulating it, as Hauser does. Yet, the Whites do not
venture into analyses of art works: it is almost as though they could only undertake
their daringly innovative task by shielding themselves from such investigations
of the art works themselves. Even styles are only discussed in a roundabout way,
in the context of changes in the training of artists. Too bad for us: the three pages
(pp. 90–93) which they devote to subject matter, styles and markets brilliantly
show that the move from portraits to landscapes was both related to changes in the
market, and to the evolution of techniques of transmission and the uses of painting.
More advanced than the social history of art, the social history of literature
shows that the Whites had a rich and coherent legacy. Darnton’s works (1971,
1979) on eighteenth-century literary France, the problem of censorship, and the
best-selling Encyclopédie, as well as those of Charle (1977) and Viala (1985),
together with those of Gamboni (1989, trans. 2011), bridged the gap between the
social history of literature and the anthropology of texts. Combining institutional,
demographic, and technical variables, they described production milieux which
set the collective rules of aesthetic appraisal, while also determining the key
locations and instances of art finding a delicate balance between art lovers, critics,
the market and training institutions. Rationalised in these terms, their perspective
evokes Bourdieu’s fields. Indeed, the theoretical assumptions behind both Viala’s
work on the birth of the writer in the seventeenth century, and Gamboni’s on
Redon’s close ties with literature and Symbolist critics, are indebted to Bourdieu,
even if they follow in the footsteps of Canvases and Careers in terms of their
method. Gamboni turned to Redon in order to bring art and literature closer
together. Attempting to ‘find a way to apprehend the territory common to art
and literature, and at the same time their specific, discrete, territories’ (2011, p.
2), he sought to avoid falling into the trap of going back to drawing parallels
and making other ‘subjective rapprochements’ (p. 1) on the basis of the Zeitgeist
of the Kulturgeschichte, or confining himself to the ‘purely factual’ quality of
‘actual contacts’ (ibid., quoting Seznec (1972)). Gamboni examines the problem
of the increased autonomy of the artistic field, and, within this field, of painting
compared with literature.30 Hence Redon’s ‘reconversion’: he went from
collaborating with Symbolist writers to defending the specificity of the visual
arts, and from achieving recognition in the academy, to doing well in the market
and with critics. Writers played a key role in the constitution of the status of the
artist by continually rewriting ‘the artist and his myth’ (Chapter 1) through ‘the
effacement of every trace of the hero’s mortal origins’ (p. 11). Redon took it upon
himself to perform this task of self-construction, ‘interven[ing] on his own behalf
in producing the value of his work’ (p. 274), much as S. Alpers’ Rembrandt (cf.
infra, pp. 143ff.) forged his own artistic and commercial value. In other words,
‘No one spoke better on the subject of Redon than Redon himself’, as one of his
critics put it (quoted p. 303). Once again, we move seamlessly from the detailed
analysis of a production milieu to theses which come close to suggesting that an
art world is collectively constructed by its actors themselves. Thus, according to
Gamboni, the active work of ‘criticism as transubstantiation’ (p. 94), transformed
‘a kind of rearguard that cherished a nostalgia for the era of romanticism [into] a
self-aware avant-garde’ (p. 95).
As soon as art historians overcame the apparently insuperable gap between
an art work and those who work around it, they started to repopulate the art
world with its mediators. This world was at odds with both the traditional art
historian’s sanctuary filled with only a few prestigious paintings and artists, and
the social historian of art’s shadow theatre, where men and art objects were merely
the puppets of the real social forces which lay behind them, demanding to be
uncovered. The enormous task of restoring the mediators who come between the
art object and the subject of taste had begun, displacing these shadowy figures
with fully fledged actors.
30
Easton (1964) had already written about the relationships of painters and writers
united by Bohemian notions and by the elaboration of a new pictorial and literary style, as
well as lifestyle.
Chapter 5
The New History of Art:
The Social in the Art Work
Alien bodies enter the process of creation as technical intermediaries (musical

instruments, the chisel, etc.) … Having passed through these mediating foreign
bodies, the activity of the author-creator becomes specialised, one-sided, and
therefore less separable from the content to which it has given a form.
M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, 1990, p. 318
As in the social history of art, the debate initiated by Haskell, in particular

(1963/80) on the role of those who commissioned art works and of patrons from
the Italian Renaissance onwards says a lot about the problems facing the history of
art. Once they started to track down the mediators of art, art historians were only
too pleased to take hold of all the mediators they could find, starting with the most
obvious official intermediaries of art: patrons, princes, merchants, advisers. They
were quick to challenge facile ‘social’ perspectives which reduced these characters
to the passive representatives of causes arbitrarily adopted by historians. Always
discovering new intermediaries lurking behind those which they recorded, art
historians worked to restore the mediators of art by narrowing the gap between
arguments focused on actors and arguments focused on art works. As they started
to repopulate the art world with its mediators, they had to explain exactly what
roles they attributed to the mediators they were discovering – or to show how these
mediators had appropriated them.
Patrons and Advisers
The collective work edited by Lytle and Orgel (1981), examining their conflicting
interpretations, outlines the contradictory ways in which the importance of
patrons and other arbiters of taste was understood. Whereas H.W. Janson gives
a traditional account of the relationship between artists and patrons, describing it
as a two-way relationship (pp. 344–53), C. Hope argues for a more subtle three-
way dynamic between artists, those who commissioned their work, and humanist
advisers (pp. 293–343). Hope challenges the significance generally granted to the
latter’s ‘programmes’. He argues that it was not so much ‘patrons’ and ‘advisers’
who dictated their programmes to artists, as social historians of art themselves, in
their haste to attribute this role to those who commissioned art works or offered
their patronage to artists – and just as hastily to ‘learned advisers’ when this role
could no longer be attributed to sponsors and patrons.1 According to these social

historians of art, the knowledge of the well-read humanists fulfilled the implicit
requirements of those who secretly powered the new machinery of bourgeois
representation, and shaped patrons’ commissions, dictating both the literary
programme a painting had to translate into a picture and how it should proceed.
As a result, they argue that the humanists were the period’s true artistic arbiters
of taste, as opposed to the grandees of the time, who had excessively vague ideas
on art and were only remotely involved in their art commissions.2 Beyond his
historical investigation of the few mediators of art known to have had a genuine
impact, Hope highlights the basic problem raised by a method that can only be
described as a manhunt, where one suspect leads scholars to the next, turning them
into detectives in search of a hidden culprit. The rhetorical necessity of isolating
a single major mediator of art while relegating others to a passive role – and even
presenting them as victims of manipulation – was at the heart of this one-sided
method. Discovering their hidden role allowed the detective to resolve the enigma
of a work’s signification and morph into a victorious hero, as opposed to previous
sleuths, who were the dupes of historical fallacies.
However, Hope is seldom explicit about the reasons why he privileges
particular types of causalities – internal/external, more individual/more social –
over others. This is where M. Warnke’s important critique comes in. Explicitly
accusing art historians of blindly restoring the mediators of art, as we shall see
(cf. supra, p. 7), he poses the principle that it is important to distinguish between
them, depending on how easy it would be to argue that they stood for a cause that
was greater than themselves, and as such incarnated the social: ‘Unlike individual
patrons, institutions have a mediating function, providing a framework for the
organisation of various needs, standards and procedures’ (1993, p. xvi). In other
words, Warnke wrong-footed everyone. While art historians paid homage to the
individual artist and underlined his singularity, he argued for an approach centred
on institutions, on the grounds that their attempt to inscribe collective norms into
art works tended to produce a higher level of generality. While art historians
simply sought to restore increasingly specific, precise and localised mediators of
art, he wished to shift the focus of the history of art away from one fixated on those
who commissioned it, along with the corporations and academies, and towards the
1
In his article on the Renaissance umanisti’s influence, Gombrich himself (1979)
could not resist the temptation of making the adviser into the secret trump card lurking
behind the patron, who was his king of hearts.
2
Extending this debate to orators and Latin itself, Baxandall considers the more
general question of the relationship between art works and the conceptual categories
which we use to think of them (‘Alberti and the Humanists: Composition’, ch. 3, 1971,
pp. 121–39). He argues that the humanists transposed rhetoric onto painting. This is easy to
decode in their later treatises, even those devoted to the practical. In other words, Baxandall
sees the humanists as mediators, adding one more layer of opacity to art production, rather
than allowing them to become the latest vector for a reductive causality.
The New History of Art: The Social in the Art Work 121
more social causes of art.3 At the same time, and perhaps more originally, he was
also opposed to the fallacy underlying the social history of art’s notion of ‘demand
pull’. Far from supporting the ideologies of a class or expressing the interests
of patrons (and far from these interests and ideologies determining works of art
through institutions) he argues that institutions on the contrary created a protective
barrier for art, allowing it to circumvent direct social demands. Arguing against the
notion that cities spurred the Renaissance by fostering a new bourgeoisie opposed
to conservative aristocratic courts, Warnke challenges the most fundamental tenets
of the social history of art. Contending that only large institutions capable of freeing
themselves at times from the constraints of the period could sponsor great artistic
projects, he shows that the courts did this as early as the middle of the thirteenth
century, over a sweeping period of time that lasted from the end of the High
Middle Ages to Giotto (1329). Indeed, Giotto, whom art historians consider to be
the archetypal modern artist because he worked to order and commanded respect
for his style, first gained promotion at the Neapolitan court. Warnke’s argument
meets those of historians tout court, who contend that it was princes who created
modernity, not the bourgeoisie. In particular, princes were responsible – through
ennoblements, for instance – for the modern notion that art has autonomous value.
The notion that works of art were objects external to society was born at court.
Even before this debate, Haskell’s work on the fascinating figure of the patron
had already suggested connections between the successive types of patronage
(religious, aristocratic, petit bourgeois) with the contents of art, making the case
for a wide range of causes of various types and different levels of generality:
‘Social and religious pressures, political upheavals, the influences of personal
temperament and of fashion all play a conspicuous part in the analysis’ (back
cover blurb, 1963 edition). Contrasting the very public art of Italy with the ‘private
and individual outlook’ of the French and Spanish, as well as of the Dutch 1980a,
p. 384) in order to account for the decline of the Baroque, Haskell also did not
automatically assume that princes were conservative. Instead, he argues that at
the end of the Baroque, the best art was supported by an aristocracy on the wane,
spurred by its decline into encouraging the production of art works that denied
its predicament. Aristocratic Italian patrons were no less ‘cultivated’ and ‘liberal’
(p. 384) than the new bourgeoisie of northern Europe. Indeed, the opposite was
true.4 They were so liberal and open-minded that modern art did not even require
3
His criticism of P. Hirschfeld’s (1968) stance on the Mäzene is part of his wider
critique of the tendency of art history to become a ‘double biography’, merely adding that
of patrons to that of artists.
4
The same was true of music, according to M. Noiray. Focusing on the pre-
revolutionary period, which was at least as rich as the revolutionary period in terms of its
musical revolutions, Noiray criticises ‘the simplistic notion that works ordered from above
were essentially conservative, whereas the liberalism of the commercial circuit generated
innovations. On the contrary, we now think that the financial independence of court
theatres allowed librettists and composers to stray from the beaten track, leaving it up to
parental homicide: why would anyone wish to take a stand against exceedingly
tolerant patrons, even if this means possibly going down with them? If Italy had no
Academy, it also had no bourgeois art to oppose academism, and no Enlightenment
either. ‘Unorthodoxy was killed with kindness.’ Although ‘the general level of
painting in Rome, Bologna, Naples, and Venice … was certainly higher than in
almost any other town in Europe’ (p. 385), the art of Italy nevertheless declined
alongside its princes: ‘The price to be paid was a high one … the fall of Venice
signified no less than the humiliating expiry of Italian art’ (p. 385).
The Infinitely Recurring Intermediaries of Art
With Haskell, the horizon of the intermediaries of art started to recede into
infinity. The trend for scholarly investigations of collectors – whose key role
Haskell emphasised5 – was characteristic of this phenomenon. Thus, O. Impey
and A. MacGregor’s (1985), K. Pomian’s (1990) and A. Schnapper’s (1988)
works on cabinets of curiosity in Europe between 1550 and 1750 examine the
‘anthropology of collecting’, from the desire to garner spoils of war, relics and
ancient treasures to the practices of modern museums, via the phenomenon
of cabinets of curiosities.6 As the title of his book – Le Géant, la licorne et la
the comptroller in charge of entertainment expenses to deal with the ruinous consequences
of their creative whims’ (1991, pp. 214–15). It is interesting to compare the stance of
historians such as Noiray with the ideologically motivated positions of social historians and
critical theorists. According to S. McClary, for example: ‘The French musical establishment
under Louis XIV recognised all too well the destabilising, exuberant, subversive character
of tonality and tried to prevent its infiltration’ (Leppert and McClary 1987, p. 22). Thus, the
fact that an ‘Absolutist court’ was in power supposedly implied that its music was stiff and
conservative, whereas in this ‘rarified world, regimented, restrained [for the sake of bon
goût]’ the ‘emotional dimension of Italian music [was] regarded as excessive, [and] motion
as dangerously close to chaos’ (p. 42). Yet, the Baroque reinterpretation of this music has led
scholars to completely reverse their understanding of the relationship between constraint
and freedom for the French and the Italians, cf. infra, Chapter 6, in particular the striking
Rousseau line quoted on p. 186.
5
Cf. Haskell, (1976/80) or ‘A Turk and his Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris’
(1987, pp. 175–85): collectors are another one of Haskell’s pet interests, and this last work
is peppered with the names of the Baron d’Hancarville, Sommariva, Morris Moore, and
Benjamin Altman.
6
Alsop (1982) looked at the different historical manifestations of collecting in general
‘wherever and whenever art collecting has appeared’ (1982, p. 100). Passionate about his
subject, Alsop can be rather arch in this book: although this makes for a pleasurable read,
it also limits the weight of his argument. On a theoretical level, this massive and erudite
history of collecting is limited to a single idea, that of ‘reversal’. Alsop’s critical perspective
on art is grounded in a chiasmic reversal: it is not rarity that spawns collectors, but collectors
that create rarity. In other words, according to him, the rarity of an object depends on the
creation of specific categories and on the definition of its distinctive characteristics. Thus
tulipe [‘the giant, the unicorn, and the tulip’] – suggests, Schnapper delights in
evoking an elusively heterogeneous jumble of objects and arguing for their radical
irreducibility. However, in the final analysis, he does not seem to consider that this
hodgepodge requires anything beyond erudite reconstitution. In contrast, Pomian
suggests that this may be explained by a certain sense of history, evolving from
scholarship to art history, from a philosophical and aristocratic ‘age of curiosity’
(p. 69), and the ambition cherished by collectors of curiosities to produce an ‘a
miniature version of the universe’ (p. 69), through to the mercantile activities
which led to museums: such collections were in a sense their foundation.7
Obviously, this decisive shift in attitudes towards the intermediaries of art
has less to do with the number of works written on them than with their new
level of complexity. The lack of attention to the intermediaries of art had made it
possible to imagine that art works were pitted against the social frame dictating
their reception, but the vacuum between art works and society began to fill up as
scholars moved abruptly from the materiality of the art works to their evaluation.
Such was the logic presiding over this restoration of the mediators of art that
their number kept rising while their scope was extended from human beings to
institutions, norms, languages, codes and even materials. These mediators were
not restored one at a time, as in the social history of art, where this restoration
depended on the theoretical perspectives of scholars, but as and when needed,
depending on whether real stakeholders had had recourse to them. As is often
the case in works of historical scholarship, no theoretical justification was given
for these decisions. Instead, they stemmed from the very close attention which
art historians paid to the questions they were investigating, and even seemed to
be dictated by these questions themselves. In fact, all the phenomena which art
historians chose to focus on from then on pertain to procedures of mediation:
catalogues, attributions, restorations, salons, repertoires, classifications, textbooks,
etc. Rather than resisting their propensity to be excessively finicky and erudite –
as opposed to sociologists, who are always ready to denounce the complacency
of those who know too much – art historians indulged this tendency, developing
it further rather than curbing it. They even turned their attention to secondary
objects, such as copies,8 and pentimenti – those traces of discarded early drafts left
countering those who contend that collections are the product of rarity, Alsop can only posit
the existence of a ‘collecting impulse’, a very broad notion which is more psychological
than historical. This instinct underpins his criticism of all essentialist definitions of art
which argue that art depends on a disinterested investment of time that only seeks the
pleasure of the eye, as opposed to the usefulness of the object.
7
See D. Poulot for a detailed review of these two books (in Moulin (ed.) 1989,
pp. 447–60). On the question of the historical development of the modern notions of
collection, museum, heritage, and cultural politics, see Poulot (1981, 1986), Friedberg
and Urfalino (1984), and Urfalino (1990), and, in the US, Meyer (1979), Stocking Jr (ed.)
(1985), Pearce (1992), McClellan (1994), Mcdonald and Fyfe (1996).
8
Cf. infra, pp. 138ff., Haskell and Penny (1982); Sénéchal (1989).
in the picture – as though by superimposing different versions of an arm, a gesture,

or a curve, in their works, they hoped to bring them back to life.9 They also showed
an explicit interest in destroyed art works: in Géographie artistique, D. Gamboni
showed that such works reveal far more about the principles of conservation than
those which survive: ‘The material properties of an object combine together with
those of its environment, partly determining its longevity’ (1987, pp. 11–12).
Gamboni had already showed the way to a new approach which did not so
much rest on a weighty research programme as on a well-chosen topic. Focusing
on the damage inflicted on contemporary art works in the city of Bienne, in
francophone Switzerland, following an exhibition of contemporary art, his work
on contemporary iconoclasm (1997, 1983b), examines the complex interplay
between the attempts of contemporary art lovers to discredit those who reject it, and
vice versa. As in iconoclastic conflicts, the very struggle opposing the proponents
and the enemies of contemporary art exhibited how strongly both groups felt about
art. Those who degraded contemporary art works did not condemn them for being
bad art, so much as for not being art. By destroying works which they perceived to
constitute a form of aggression, they refused to acknowledge the existence of the
Other. With perfect symmetry, those who supported the exhibition did not resent
the vandals for rejecting it, so much as for not understanding anything about art. To
those who said: ‘Your art is meaningless’, they replied: ‘Your act is meaningless.’10
Attributing their opponents’ gestures to their ignorance, they opposed them the
same denial they had met with – while also avoiding to ask themselves whether
their art may in fact constitute a form of violence. It is perfectly justified to use the
language of iconoclasm in such cases, since this term emphasises the fact that the
conflict opposing the enemies and the supporters of avant-garde art implied their
mutual recognition, as well as the fact that each group refused to acknowledge that
the other also spoke in the name of art. Gamboni’s analysis of this conflict gives us
a striking if indirect insight into the strategies of contemporary art, which has itself
proclaimed the nothingness of its object to the extent that its coherence now seems
to depend entirely on anticipating the potential persecutions of its enemies with
acts of counter-persecution. In the process, the strength of feeling displayed by the
enemies of contemporary art paradoxically benefits an art form which would be
killed by indifference. Avant-garde art must meet with resistance in order to exist:
9
In 1991, the Louvre Museum devoted an entire exhibition to pentimenti: ‘50
Drawings from Leonardo da Vinci to Matisse.’ It would have been difficult to conceive of
such an exhibition 20 years earlier.
10
This is epitomised by the case of one of Noël Dolla’s ‘serpillières’ (floorcloths),
which the Museum’s cleaning lady supposedly took away. The meaning of such stories
depends on the teller: the same story can disqualify the ignoramuses who remain impervious
to the avant-garde, or ridicule an art form which would be nothing if it were not labelled as
such. As with iconoclasm, everything hinges on how well-qualified we consider the authors
of the gesture – on whether we condescendingly forgive their ignorance or believe they
deliberately indulged in sabotage in the name of art.
its vandals are the ultimate sign of the artistic value of an art form which keeps
proclaiming its death but does not actually wish to be taken literally.11
Studies of the copies of artistic works also displace the question of value,
although they do not so much focus on ‘the actors themselves’ as on ‘the objects
themselves’ (which I believe to be just as worthy of being placed between inverted
commas as the former, in the hope of that this might help to liberate them from
the rather dismal isolation which this reflexive pronoun implies) P. Sénéchal
(1989) thus evokes the debates on the respective merits of plaster and marble
for making copies of ancient statues: depending on what material was chosen,
art was either considered to consist of abstract forms (plaster) or unique objects
(marble). Sénéchal argues that the very fragility of plaster reveals what Roman
statues incarnated for eighteenth-century art lovers. Initially, plaster casts were
used to show how statues might have looked before being mutilated, and intact
copies could become the models for damaged originals and serve as templates
for their restoration. However, plaster casts were soon more highly considered
than ancient statues, on the grounds that they actually represented the true forms
of the works as opposed to the damaged materiality of the original statues: only
copies allowed them to be ‘contemplated in their almost ideal nudity’ (p. 5). Quite
apart from those who defended plaster casts on aesthetic grounds (such as Étienne
Falconet, who praised their ‘apology for the immaculate’ (quoted p. 6)) or for
pedagogical reasons (on the grounds that they made the works easier to ‘read’),
Sénéchal argues that the proponents of copies explicitly developed a theory of art
which privileged form over matter and favoured temporal and spatial universality
over the statues’ actual Roman location and wear and tear: ‘In Rome, we admire
more than we think’ (Falconet, quoted p. 5). However, Sénéchal also shows that
plaster casts played a fundamental role in bringing about the supremacy of original
works, which eventually disqualified copies. Plaster casts helped to bring about
the birth of comparative analyses of Classical statues, allowing each work to be
described, dated and classified. In turn, this meant that original Roman statues
could ‘arouse suspicions’ (p. 9): when they seemed familiar, their signatures were
investigated and scholars recalled how few great artists Pliny named. As it became
easier to distinguish between copies, replicas and later variants, plaster casts went
from being praised to being devalued, and original works worshipped once more!
11
The same logic presides over Gamboni’s decision, in his next work, to write a
monograph on a modern artist who was a religious traditionalist, Louis Rivier (1985).
Gamboni does not yield to the attractions of writing on a paradoxical subject by choosing
to work on an anti-modernist who wished to reconcile the temple with images, and the
people with art. On the contrary, ‘far from having any intention of rehabilitating (this art)
or returning to the misunderstandings and confusion’ (p. 7) which such a rehabilitation
would entail, Gamboni looks at what this painter’s progress reveals about the stakes of
a field which is more complex than the linear perspective which victorious modernists
(who are now retreating) have on artists perceived as ‘anachronistic obstacles to the natural
development of artistic progress’ because they fought for a ‘lost cause’ (ibid.).
Ironically, however, although it was initially revered for being the original temple
of statues which were themselves celebrated for being new and unique, the Roman
world turned out to have produced serial copies of them – and indeed operated on
the principle of ‘seriality’; (p. 21; also cf. infra, pp. 138–42, Haskell and Penny
1982, ch. 13). Modern plaster casts allowed new scholars such as Pierre-Jean
Mariette to discover that already in the Classical world, the market and the artists’
studios thrived on the active production of ancient copies.12
Behind every newly discovered mediator lurks another one, previously
unsuspected. As a result, it looks as though there are no fixed reference points left
to art historians, while at the same time it seems impossible for them to dismiss
any of the possible causes of art. They are finally on the trail of the paintings,
and indeed of the artists themselves, whom S. Alpers (1991, cf. infra, pp. 143–8)
showed to have been the architects of their own future authority, and even the
inventors of their own ‘name’. Thus, Rembrandt ensured that each one of his works
would become ‘a Rembrandt’ after his death. After Rembrandt, but not without
him, as traditional history would have it: according to Alpers, what happened after
Rembrandt did not happen independently of him, but as a result of the incredible
strategy which he devised, from the studio to the market. As the work of art started
to be perceived independently of its previously defining functions, patrons and
buyers, it was now the turn of the painting to characterise them. There is perhaps
no better way to put this than to say that just as copies produced originals, or
collectors objects worth collecting, the work of artists – and more generally
of those who belonged to the art world – was now focused on establishing the
painting itself as the foundation of a new art world. It is they who took painting out
of the social and religious world where it had meaning for and offered guidance to
a group, into an art world where the group bows down before it.
I shall now discuss four seminal works which came out of this new ‘reconciled’13
history of art, in order to show that it is possible to actively overcome the clash
between aesthetic and sociologic discourses: in their own way, each of these books
proved able to discuss art and the social – and art works and their value – together
and in the same terms.14
12
This led this ‘antiquarian’ to develop a theory which legitimised the copies of both
the Moderns and the Ancients on the grounds that the artist whom they had chosen to
imitate was beyond their reach. In Traité des pierres gravées, Mariette wrote that: ‘It would
have been too demeaning for them to copy each other so cravenly; but working from the
same model by a more ancient Artist, they could imitate it without appearing to lack genius’
(1750, p. 38, quoted in Sénéchal 1989, p. 28).
13
In the sense that ‘social history and art history are continuous’, as Baxandall asserts
(1972, Preface to the first edition) 30 years after Gombrich expressed this rather caustic
regret: ‘Paradoxical as it may sound, the most serious objection to his approach is that it
bypasses the social history of art’ (1963–78, p. 91).
14
This was not an easy move for art historians who loved to their art. As even the
art merchant Gersaint, whose art catalogues were considered exemplary throughout the
eighteenth century, remarked rather bitterly: ‘Given our lack of experience in comparing
M. Baxandall: Integrating the Elements of a Visual Culture
Emphasising the categories of the reception of art, and establishing the connections
between these categories and the role of patrons and clients, Baxandall’s Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972–88) provides a response to
Panofsky’s argument in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis and its
Art Treasures (1946–79; cf. supra, pp. 108–9). Baxandall takes a highly original
approach to art history’s inevitable concern with patrons. He starts by examining
the very specific contracts they entered into artists: as well as detailing the subject
matter, methods, materials and colours of the art works they commissioned,
they increasingly required that they be produced by the master painter himself,
formally stipulating that his assistants should not be involved in their production.
This last demand is proof that they understood that the value of a painting lay first
and foremost in its author, unlike in earlier times, when artisanal craftsmanship
depended on a combination of technical skill and high-quality materials. Social
historians of art have traditionally been keen to explore this question. However,
Baxandall examines the figure of the patron as a strategist: ‘an active, determining
and not necessarily benevolent agent in the transaction of which the painting is
a result’ (1988, p. 1).15 Baxandall’s work reveals both the meaning which the
contemporaries of the Renaissance ascribed to paintings, and what categories
can be pertinently deployed to analyse them. He does not read the figure of the
patron as an unconscious representative of higher interests or greater collective
representations, but as an actor who seeks to stabilise his relationship with
other actors: the viewers of the future. According to Baxandall, a ‘client’ would
concretely target these viewers by inscribing his project within the precious object
that is the painting, through a combination of investment strategies, ranging from
the general to the particular: as one of them explains, I do this to ‘serve the glory
of God, the honour of my city, and the commemoration of myself’ (p. 2).
Baxandall’s work illustrates how much the history of art had moved on after
Panofsky. Modern scholars were guided by a new theoretical and methodological
imperative, which banned them from making generalisations based on great
ideological discourses or systems of classification. These discourses and systems
were now reread as archives of thought enabling them to draw broad parallels
from the direct analysis of residual objects. Apparently easy to deduce from the
fixed points of reference which historiographical research had established, these
the works of the very many skilful painters of Italy, whom we know so little, and of whom
we possess but a few works, we would often be foolhardy indeed if we attempted to make
attributions which could, at any moment, be challenged perfectly legitimately’ (quoted by
K. Pomian 1990, p. 144). Sociologists were forewarned!
15
I cannot think of a better definition for a mediator. Because of the active role of ‘the
man who asked for, paid for, and found a use for the painting’, Baxandall explains that ‘we
can fairly call him a client’ rather than patron, which is the usual term (p. 1) and the one
that we have adopted too.
parallels had a circular effect, since they themselves increased the impression of
homogeneity and coherence which they sought to establish. In short, the ‘eye’ of
the Quattrocento, according to Baxandall was anything but a Zeitgeist!
There are three major conclusions to draw from Baxandall’s work, which
enable us to rethink the concept of mediation:
1. In order to discover ‘a society’s visual practises’ (p. 109), we must stay

focused on practices, and allow the heterogeneous orders to overlap, where
these practices are operative. Thus, Baxandall reconstructs the perceptive
apparatus of ‘The church-going dancing trader’ (ibid.) through his ability
to preach, dance and gauge barrel capacities. Indeed, the ‘Moral and
Spiritual Eye’ (p. 104) of those who looked at paintings, usually at church,
while also acknowledging their donors, was constantly trained by religious
practice. In order to fulfil the theological role which they assigned to texts
and images respectively, pastoral practices assigned them three essential
functions: they had to be ‘clear’, ‘memorable’ and ‘stirring’ (p. 43). The
gaze had to be entirely directed towards an understanding of the Word,
through a set of codes which the people of this period, unlike us, could
immediately decipher, such as the hierarchy of colours (gold, ultramarine
blue, followed by ordinary blue) or the language of gestures, the codes of
which Baxandall also finds in the bassa danza.
2. We must grasp the reciprocal and continuous processes of the interplay
whereby objects come to generate visual habits and habits come to
generate works of art, rather than confine ourselves to the notion that
culture asserts itself either from below (deriving the works from
habituses) or from above (deducing the eye of a century from the agenda
of its art works): ‘Social facts … lead to the development of distinctive
visual skills16 and habits: and these visual skills and habits become
identifiable elements in the painter’s style’ (Preface to the first edition).
Baxandall retraces the technical habits of the gaze by examining a set
of mnemotechnic techniques and mathematical tricks. These habits
constituted a practical codification of forms, and accustomed merchants
to evaluating quantities: this explains why Quattrocento paintings play so
much with proportions (in particular with the harmonic sequence 6 8 9 12
(cf. p. 101)), and why so many of the objects represented in these works
‘belong to the repertory of stock objects used in … gauging exercises … –
cisterns, columns, brick towers, paved floors, and the rest’ and are there
to ‘invoke the gauger’s response’ (p. 87). Paintings trained the eye, in
other words. Far from their sources constituting isolated evidence of
16
The terminology deployed in the work’s French translation gives a clear
Bourdieusian slant to this argument, by using two different words – the ‘skills’ of the artist
(‘habileté’) and of the public (‘disposition’) – where Baxandall deliberately uses only one,
emphasising the fact that perception is an active process, a skill.
effects which it is the historians’ task to piece together, paintings are

themselves filled with prescriptive and normative suggestions of a drive
towards coherence. They must therefore be grasped in their continuity of
the web which they weave, which extends from isolated, passive, traces
of a disposition disclosed elsewhere, to their explicit attempts to create or
improve habits. Take the figure of the ‘festaiuolo’, for example: a minor
character in a group, he stares ‘directly at us’, establishing ‘a relationship
between us and it’ (p. 75) and inviting us to commit ourselves to take part
in the group represented – i.e. ‘active accessories to the event’ (p. 76).
Or take Baxandall’s patient reconstitution of the ‘intellectual equipment’
(p. 101) of Cristoforo Landino – ‘the best lay critic of painting in the
period’ (Preface to the first edition), which shows how painting relates
to Quintilian’s rhetoric and humanist literary criticism. Baxandall shows
that the Quattrocento used rhetoric performatively, deploying the sturdy
architecture of scholastics to which we have become oblivious, to draw
close parallels between the making and the reading of paintings.17 The
mechanical application of rhetorical principles allowed viewers to
gauge whether a painting imitated nature and displayed relief, purity,
perspective, ease and grace (cf. pp. 119–30), sometimes leading both
parties before the courts. This could not have been further from the
assertion of the subjective experience of personal tastes for art works
understood as aesthetic objects.
3. Lastly, and in connection with these methodological points, we
must absolutely abstain from forging connections where there is no
identifiable intermediary:
Baxandall is all the more persuasive for not “making up” any connections
which have not been explicitly established and designated as such … Thus,
he denounces those who decipher symbols and secret codes [cf. p. 81], their
hypothetical “secret meanings” being at once scientifically suspicious (anything
is possible) and contradicting what the documents of the period suggest.18
17
Rhetoric opposed compositio – the articulations between the pictorial equivalents
of sentences, clauses, propositions – to its complements, variety and ornamentation, the
assessment of which depended on their subtlety, elegance, abundance, joyfulness, charm,
as well as on their level of detail, on the one hand, and on their precision and correction, on
the other. See also Baxandall (1971), cf. infra, p. 120, n. 2.
18
M. Akrich (in Moulin (ed.) 1989, p. 444). In her review of Painting and
Experience, Akrich rightfully draws attention to the fact that this method is in some ways
contradicted by the way in which Baxandall repeatedly asserts that it is impossible for
twentieth-century eyes to read what Quattrocento people saw. It is as though one simply
had to relearn their categories, instead of investigating the long chain of mediations
which nevertheless allows us today to deploy categories which did not exist at the time
in order to see paintings that were produced in a context which has now disappeared. As
we shall see, Haskell and Penny’s (1982) analysis of Classical statues approaches this
It is not helpful to suggest that fifteenth-century viewers understood the reluctance

painted on Mary’s face, as the Angel spoke to her, in terms of a split subject
in the throes of ecstatic desire, à la Lacan: Baxandall argues that knowing
the five ‘conditions’ of the Annunciation (the feelings of the Virgin – in this
case, her surprise and anxiety at the strangeness of what is being announced)
would advantageously prevent such anachronistic misinterpretations of her
facial expression.
However, Baxandall’s most important contribution lay perhaps not so much
in his explicit objective – reconstituting the ‘eye’ of a century – as in the fact that
his works allow us to bridge the gaps between analyses of paintings and actors,
and between the reception and production of art. Although he focuses entirely
one-sidedly on the reception of art, every single one of the categories which
he outlines can also be used to speak of the production of the paintings, and is
directly in evidence in the sources which reveal the categories of the period – the
one being the consequence of the other. Baxandall re-established the continuity
between the sociology of culture and the history of art, at least for the fifteenth
century, by combining the careful attention to detail of historical research with
a great sensitivity to the process of making the paintings (materials, subject
matter, composition).19
Baxandall is not an isolated figure. S. Alpers’ work on seventeenth-century
Dutch painting also reinstates an art world with its categories: she reconstructs this
world through human actions and the artistic ideal of ‘a sincere hand and a faithful
eye’ (1983, Chapter 3). She quotes Baxandall’s concept of ‘visual culture’ (p. 25)
to evoke the combination of habits, sets of techniques, customs and words which
made Dutch painting into a descriptive tool (among others, such as maps and the
camera oscura): ‘ut pictura, ita visio’ (Chapter 2). This tool cannot be understood
in terms of the Italian narrative model. Nor can it be reduced to the moral precepts
contained in Dutch painting, ignoring its specifically visual procedures. This leads
Alpers to challenge the ‘extent [to which] the study of art and its history has been
determined by the art of Italy and its study’ (p. xix).
problem more convincingly, cf. infra, pp. 138ff. We shall return to the question of our
relationship with past objects across two centuries in our analysis of the reinterpretation
of baroque music, cf. infra Chapter 6, pp. 165–207.
19
Baxandall’s work on The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980)
also focuses on the critical language of the period, as well as shedding light on an artisan
world which was split between working in church studios and serving Princes, and
which operated under a regime of monopolies and was protected by guilds. This work
highlights the relationship between a set of visual criteria and literary forms, and the precise
codification of the expression of a range of feelings. Baxandall shows how the sculptor’s
practical experience and the market (which was dictated by bourgeois gift-giving) shaped
each other through this gallery of portraits sharing characteristic features.
C. Ginzburg: From Interpretation to Investigation
C. Ginzburg’s The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca (1983; trans.

1985, revised ed. 2000) is written in the same perspective. Taking Baxandall’s
argument in two interconnected directions, this extraordinarily clearly written
and powerfully argued book is a tour de force, which successfully challenges
disciplinary prohibitions.
(1) Operating the same methodological reversal of the status of painting
as Baxandall (cf. infra, p. 128), Ginzburg considers that paintings constitute
‘documents of political and religious history’ (p. xxvii). However, far from simply
adding to the history with polite borrowings from new sources condoned by
historians of art, Ginzburg uses history provocatively to create a stir in the history
of art. Rather than meekly deferring to disciplinary boundaries, he attempts to
show that historians can (and must) probe art works in great depth, without setting
any a priori limits to their investigations. There is no order of juxtaposed realities
to invalidate the approach of historians beyond a certain point. The disjunction
between what lies inside and outside a painting does not constitute a global
boundary, marking out the limits of the disciplinary territories of art historians
and historians tout court. Instead, this disjunction operates at every level and in
every last aspect of making and interpreting a painting. This led Ginzburg to take
a bold stand on the dating, attribution and iconological definition of the subject
matter of art works – i.e. the most specifically art historical questions. Indeed, he
reevaluated Piero’s global significance.
Ginzburg was perfectly conscious of what was at stake in his approach and
draws the apt conclusion:
Had I referred to Piero’s paintings as evidence of fifteenth-century religious life,

or had I contented myself with rediscovering the network of Arezzo patrons, I
could no doubt have established peaceful relations with the learned body of art
historians. But they will probably take it amiss that I have outlined an image of
Piero that differs from the familiar one, and have even disputed the chronology
of some of his major works. (pp. xxvii–xxviii)
This is not say that Ginzburg advocates symbolism for all comers and ‘absurd
iconographic interpretation’ (p. xxii): instead, he invokes the principle of the
‘comprehensiveness, coherence, [and] economy’ (p. 8) of a puzzle, after Settis.20
The investigation does helps to examine:
20
In his analysis of the ‘hidden subject’ of Giorgione’s Tempest, Settis made a similar
case for locating the investigation between ‘two categories: one is the “familiar”, almost
anecdotal version … the other is the rejection of any recognizable subject’ (1994, p. 59).
Ginzburg’s reference to Settis is apposite. Settis makes two important points in Giorgione’s
‘Tempest’. Firstly, he shifts the analytical perspective by listing (in ‘The Interpreter’s
Workshop’ (ch. 3)) the conflicting interpretations that the mysterious eponymous painting
the question (trite, but no less acute) of the relation between the work of art and
the social context in which it was born … in order to achieve … the reconstruction
of the intricate web of minute relations that underlies the production of any work
of art … and avoid … precipitate or far-fetched parallels between the sequence
of artistic phenomena and the sequence of socio-economic phenomena.
(pp. xxvi–xxxvii)
I don’t think there is a better way of putting this.

Ginzburg’s reinterpretation makes it very clear that what we see when we look
at an art work is closely interconnected with the disciplinary and methodological
frame which forms our vision. Because of their insight into the genesis of a
painting, historians (as opposed to art historians) may be able to interpret the
actions of its protagonists in a light that would not even occur to art historians. As
opposed to those who read the merchant Graziani’s wish to expiate his sins of usury
into Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, Ginzburg’s authoritative historical
approach allows him to weave a web of connections between this painting and a
wide range of questions of various origins and levels of generality, ranging from
the 1439 Council of Florence on the unity of the Eastern and Western churches,
to the theme of the Trinity, and – before this – to the political homage which the
artist pays to the humanist Ambrose Traversari (1386–1439) for supporting Pope
Eugene IV against the schismatic Council of Basel (which opened in 1431). As
he performs this reconstruction, piecing his argument together as though it were a
puzzle, Ginzburg discovers the same complex political and religious assemblage
in Piero della Francesca’s Arezzo cycle: the rapprochement between the Eastern
and Western churches (the meeting between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon),
Traversari’s influence, and Cardinal Johannes Bessarion’s (1403–1472) call for
a crusade against the Turks (ibid., pp. 56–63). The Cardinal intervened in the
has received (summarised on pp. 48–55): yet, Settis does not present these interpretations
as though they were based on elements found in Giorgione’s Tempest. Instead, he
analyses the different ways in which it has been read, pointing to what underlies these
interpretations, from projections of controversy, to anachronistic aesthetic readings and
social or biographical romances, and from debates between those who argue for and against
this work having a subject, to the desire to read into it the artist’s wish to be emancipated
from his patron, etc. Secondly, and even more innovatively, Settis does not limit himself to
deciphering the ‘hidden subject’ of this celebrated work. Instead, he explicitly probes the
principle underlying this veiling of the subject, and presents it as the generalising tool which
makes it possible for a painting to produce meaning, by making it possible for Venetian
humanists – and indeed for us – to revisit, actualise and personalise a subject: ‘the patron’s
own faith, and his personal ideas and preoccupations, as well as his relationship with the
painter, had renovated a traditional theme and brought it into a contemporary dimension.
In the Tempest … an old theme is brought into the present through Adam’s entirely modern
dress … The Tempest eluded too immediate a reading. If, on the one hand, its iconographic
schema was quite recognizable … on the other hand the subject had nevertheless been
“attenuated”’ (p. 125).
production of the Arezzo cycle following the death of the work’s first sponsor,
Francesco Bacci, who was initially relayed by his son. This explains why the
painting’s iconographic agenda changed (and also why it was difficult to date later
on). A priest of the Eastern Roman church, Bessarion was named Metropolitan of
Nicaea in 1437. Bessarion, who was close to the penultimate Byzantine Emperor
John VIII Palaiologos, actively lobbied him in favour of the reconciliation of the
two churches, which was finally signed in 1439. Following the failure of this
union when their delegation returned to Constantinople, Bessarion had to return
to Rome, where the Pope made him a Cardinal. This story is the invisible thread
that runs through the painting: Constantine is made to look like John Palaiologos
in Piero’s fresco. Meanwhile, in the real world, John Palaiologos had given a relic
of the True Cross (which is the subject matter of the Arezzo cycle) to Patriarch
Gregory Mammas, who had in turn bequeathed it to … Bessarion.
(2) What does Ginzburg make of this confusing series of interlocking
connections? One of the great merits of his methodical approach is that it shows
just how precise and specific the strategic aims of pictorial representation were
for all these powerful actors: far from having the abstract ability to transmit a
‘symbolic’ significance,21 paintings had the concrete ability to have double
meanings, to relate a present predicament to a past event, and to pin a private
feeling to an aspect of faith or history – in short, to allow meaning to circulate
between the particular and the general, the individual and the collective. The same
is true of Ginzburg’s analysis of Piero’s Flagellation of Christ, located in Urbino.
Arguing that the work’s double meaning operates on two levels, he suggests a
three-tiered interpretation, which closely follows the perspective constructed by
Piero. Ginzburg shows that, in this painting, Piero links the memory of the shared
suffering of a youth’s father (to whom the work is destined) and godfather (who
commissioned the work) 20 years after the young man’s death to, on the one
hand, the contemporary suffering of Eastern Christians under Turkish threat (the
man who commissioned the work wished to start a crusade against the Turks, but
the work’s intended recipient was opposed to this), and, on the other hand, the
suffering of Christ as a consequence of Pontius Pilate’s cowardice – in the same
way, Eastern Christians were the victims of an emperor’s cowardice. Moreover,
the loss of a humanistic son fluent in Latin and Greek evokes the imminent loss of
the Greek cultural riches of Constantinople after its Turkish conquest, while the
presentation of the lost son as an innocent victim recalls Christ. Highlighting the
strategic implications of Piero’s Flagellation, Ginzburg presents this painting as
one powerful tool among others in the attempt to shape the meaning of a situation.
In the light of this devastatingly powerful reading, it is easy to see how utterly
unconvincing it is to resort to external explanations which propose ‘symbolic’
interpretations where art appeals to religion for political or social gain, relying on
these ready-made notions, taking them for universals.
21
Although he duly pays homage to the Warburg Institute, Ginzburg nevertheless
takes a shot at the ‘Warburg method’ of deciphering symbols.
The mediators of art that Ginzburg restores are much more active than
the patrons invoked by traditional historians and social historians of art. The
excessively stable and autonomous conception that art historians and social
historians have of art works means that when they examine a commission for a
piece of art, they can only understand the patron’s gesture in characteristically dual
terms, and typically hesitate between recognition and denunciation. Prematurely
overstating the disinterestedness of art leads them to anachronistically read a
patron’s investment in something that could only bring him uncertain, belated,
and indirect recognition, in terms of greatness and generosity. Conversely, when
they refuse to attribute this supposed disinterestedness to the figure of the patron,
they track down the true and hidden motivations lurking behind his apparently
disinterested gesture, denouncing it too hastily by always invoking the same, fixed
and rather unimaginative incentives: a quest for prestige, or a need to ‘launder’
money earned too fast for honest gains. Patrons, in their eyes, had no alternative
between serving the interests of art and using art for their own interests.
Ginzburg’s gambit involved stepping outside the ‘history of art’ in order to write
the ‘history’ of art. This allowed him both to restore the mediators of art who can
otherwise seem two-dimensional – such as those powerful patrons whose complex
strategies and attachments he described – as intelligent flesh-and-blood characters,
and to proceed with ‘an analytical reconstruction of the intricate web of minute
relations that underlies the production of any work of art’ through a detective-style
investigation of clues.22 Moreover, according to Ginzburg, this rigorous stance
alone could solve the issues surrounding the dating of an art work, its subject
matter, and the identity of the characters it represents. ‘Combining an analysis of
iconography with an analysis of commissioning’ (p. 28) and of those responsible
for ‘research into commissioning’ (p. 9) made it possible to discover the political
and religious implications of an art work, whereas stylistic analysis could not. This
also enabled the reconstitution of ‘the specific instructions, conveyed to the artist
by the patron of the painting or by some intermediary’ (p. xxv), even when there
were no traces left of these instructions. Investigation displaced interpretation.
The status of a commission changed entirely. Evaluating the external influence
of a given factor on a painting understood as a well-defined phenomenon, was
no longer what was at stake. Instead, analysing a commission involved restoring
the rich and complex interplay between the work in its every detail – including its
technique of representation and its composition, if not its style – and the strategic
implications of offering it to someone. This change from the search for causes to
the restoration of mediations is at the heart of my own argument.
It is worth reformulating this crucial point in explicit terms. The actors that
social historians of art presupposed were not mediators, but passive representatives.
The range of possible behaviours they engaged in, was a priori limited by the
22
As when he returns to the debate between M. Tanner and E. Battisti on the two
angels who shake hands in the Baptism of Christ (pp. 5–14), or to the dispute surrounding
the scaffolding for the Arezzo fresco (pp. 24–7), which were crucial for dating these works.
anachronistic assumption that painting was affiliated with the history of art. The
notion that the desire to assert prestige, redeem wealth and exhibit power motivated
art commissions implicitly assumes that paintings already had a stable status and
were merely part of the history of art. This analysis implies the existence of a causal
relationship between two separate orders of reality constructed as parallel to each
other. In contrast, the activities of the mediators that Ginzburg uncovered are part of
an overall strategy. Far from exhibiting the detachment, and the indirect, deferred
investment in art of those who are defined in terms of art as disinterested beauty,
Ginzburg’s mediators placed paintings, and the relationships which they allowed
them to establish, at the service of crucial – religious and political – objectives:
confronting the schism of the Church, launching crusades, and achieving the
union of the Eastern and Western churches. In order to achieve this, they did not
seek to harness the support of ‘art’ in general, as materialised by one painting in
particular. Instead, they exploited the entire gamut of possibilities which arose in
a given situation from commissioning a painting – i.e. having it made and offering
it to someone, choosing its subject matter and its painter, and balancing general
questions of reputation with the specific way in which the painting was done, etc.
Conversely, offering someone a painting is only one element in an open-ended
series of power relations, alliances, invitations or even threats. A long period of
time had to pass before the paintings themselves gradually started to seem to be
at the centre of a stable reality, as they are now: this could only happen after
the relationships based on gift-giving and superimposed layers of meaning which
had inspired the works had been forgotten, while conversely their materiality
took over, allowing them to survive this dissolution. Once the painting’s initial
mediations disappear, there remains only the physical object, ready to be rapidly
seised by new mediations – such as those which social history and the history of
art expertly weave around it.
Beyond Relativism: Are Generalisations Possible?
There are still more lessons to be drawn from the history of art. Although art
historians agreed on the need to locate the specific, historically identifiable
mediators of art, whose actions altered the production of art together with the
criteria for what qualified as art, the theoretical premise of this historical work is
still an open question. Some art historians leaned towards an erudite historicist
stance: promoting the refusal of all general causes into an epistemological
requirement, they delighted in providing historical counter-examples to invalidate
any attempt at making generalisations. Haskell takes this ‘total aesthetic
relativism’ (1980b, p. 117) very far. He tracks the resales, changing evaluations
and reinterpretations of the paintings which the French brought back from Italy
under Napoléon, in order to create public collections in the nation’s museums –
a universal heritage constituted under France’s enlightened patronage – before
auctioning them off to the British, which led to the constitution of the first great
modern collections. According to Haskell, the fluctuating aesthetic and financial

worth of these paintings as they travelled from one place to another shows that
none of these values can resist change. He suggests that their Italian roots, French
consecration, and British appreciation aptly summarise the three modern criteria
for determining the value of a painting: the first is historical and national, the
second is cultural and universal, and the third is economic and private. With this
powerful argument, Haskell challenges both aestheticians, who are convinced that
beauty is transcendental, and sociologists, who hasten to provide more systematic
explanations for these variations than this chaotic set of radically heterogeneous
and unpredictable circumstances allows.23
Relativism is not the most interesting outcome of this art historical trend,
however: its refusal to accept that art has any single cause merely functions as
an ironic reversal of the position of those who argue that art has a single cause,
whatever this cause may be. Turning its back on orderly general principles, this
trend favours the particular, where all is fortuitous. However, there was no need
to move so abruptly from the notion that art had regular, external, stable causes,
to the idea that it had none. Having made his peace with the loss of all global
explanations, a historian can still try to understand what structures inform a
world, reflecting the unequal values of its artefacts and its people: continuously
assembling and reinterpreting contradictory and heterogeneous causes can
nevertheless produce stability when these causes are considered together with
artefacts. Alpers’ and Baxandall’s contributions to the history of art tend towards
this reciprocal perspective, in which human beings are constructed by things and
things by human beings. Although they carefully examine each fact on a case by
case basis, establishing the infinite complexity and ultimate uniqueness of each one
of them, they are nevertheless also attentive to the way in which some of these facts
gradually start to stand out, becoming more stable and general – even if achieving
this can require them to simultaneously emphasise structured individual choices
and random circumstances, focus on explicitly founded projects and unfortunate
consequences, and highlight some properties which they sought to discover, as
well as some unexpected features appearing in the course of their investigation.
Moreover, words have different meanings in different disciplines, depending
on how these disciplines are constructed. The relativism that sociologists toy with
23
In his review of the French translation of Haskell’s book, P. Dagen shared this
hostility: in his eyes, the book amounts to no more than ‘a set of specific examples, from
which he (Haskell) refuses to draw the smallest general rule, remaining absolutely faithful to
his programme’ (Le Monde, 19 September 1991). The book’s only saving grace, according
to him, is that sometimes ‘the author again allows himself to rise above this catalogue
of proper names’, finally allowing ‘analysis to take over from description, and aesthetic
thought to rise over the chaos of small facts’. I would argue that not doing this is precisely
this book’s main quality.
is not the same as that of the art historians.24 The sociologists’ relativism relates to
the value of art, and the art historians’ to its causes. Following their disciplinary
bent, sociologists are spontaneously relativistic, in the sense that they challenge
the absolute character of aesthetic judgements: however, they are not so keen on
relativism when it comes to social causes. Art historians, on the other hand, leave the
question of the value of art open:25 they are torn between acknowledging that it has
always been historically variable and yet feeling that analyses which are incapable
of recognising it are worthless. However, they stand firm in their refusal to accept
the absolute nature of any causal explanation. As a result, when sociologists and art
historians debate this question, the result is a dialogue of the deaf: their conflicting
standpoints lead them to have opposite views on reintroducing the role of the
mediators of art. From the sociologists’ perspective, this restoration threatens to
derail their scientific project and condemn it to wallow in relativism, because it
destroys the very impetus for social explanations, in favour of a simple focus on
tracking the local fluctuations of value and the judgements of actors.26 Blinded by
the internal conflicts of their own discipline, sociologists hardly understand that,
from an art historical point of view, reintroducing the mediators of art is far from
being a relativistic gesture: on the contrary, this restoration is what might allow
them to temper the aesthetic relativism of the historian: there do exist some de
facto values! Gombrich states this explicitly:
the approach through the social sciences can serve as an important corrective [to
“radical relativism” in “aesthetic matters”]. It can help the art historian to reflect
on the social role of the various activities we bundle together under the word
“art”. (1979, p. 149)
In the same way, ‘style’ is another intermediary level which analysts can use as a
tool to ‘mitigate’ (p. 146) relativistic assessments, because it provides some basis
for making assessments, while freeing them from the assumption that art works
have an absolute value.
24
‘It is risky to challenge relativism in matters of artistic value and to assert that
even in the elusive region of aesthetic judgment there are statements which are true and
others which false’ (1979, p. 144). This evokes what Francastel says about our frames
of reception: ‘Space will always be conceived in terms of myth and geometry, form and
content, and human societies will have many more different myths and geometries than
those which we have constructed’ (1951, p. 300).
25
The ‘sociological’ relativism of art historians is paradoxical: they use it to defy their
own discipline, or invoke it when they do not share a particular taste, as when Gombrich, in
‘The Vogue of Abstract Art’, speaks of the ‘fashionable don’ts’ of art lovers constrained by
snobbery to reject what they love (1978, p. 146).
26
Based only on ‘person-to-person relations’, as Bourdieu puts it, in his discussion of
symbolic interactionism (1990b, p. 291, footnote 6).
F. Haskell: Networks of Partial and Heterogeneous Causes
This is precisely what Haskell does, on a theoretical level. Although less convinced
than Gombrich that it is possible to overcome relativism, he nevertheless does not
challenge the notion that one should try: ‘it is possible to avoid the quicksands
of total aesthetic relativism by postulating that widening horizons and deeper
knowledge will eventually lead to the creation of new and more soundly based
standards’ (1980b, p. 117).27 Haskell does not see himself as a champion of
relativism at all, despite the fact that the delight he shows at the constant mutation
of tastes depending on a wide range of factors might make his stance appear
relativistic, in comparison with both the aestheticist transformation of art into an
indisputable value, and its sociologistic subordination to a greater social cause:
‘To conclude that variations of taste in the arts are, like Pagan gods, so wholly
arbitrary and capricious that they can merely be observed – and worshipped – is to
abdicate responsibility at too early a stage’ (ibid., p. 8). Yet, the argument which
Haskell develops in the very work where he pens these lines – Rediscoveries in
Art 28 – seems to contradict his words, as he allows himself to be swayed by the
iconoclastic tendencies which lurk within all art historians. As a rule, Haskell is a
keen advocate of individual case studies drawing on a specific network of partial
and heterogeneous causes for which identifiable actors are responsible. This is,
however, very different from refusing to attribute any cause to art. Indeed, Haskell
gives one of the most lucid accounts of the practical theory of causality which has
always underpinned the history of art:
It is often quite impossible to account adequately for these developments (in the
reputations of statues across space and time] though we have indicated where we
believe that particular factors – the praise of an influential artist or connoisseur,
the whim of an imaginative restorer, the impact of political power, the accident
of an unexpected discovery, a new direction in scholarship – may have been
responsible. (1982, p. xiv)
27
It is interesting to note that what is rejected is always a ‘total’ – or ‘radical’, in
the case of Gombrich – relativism, as opposed to a ‘relative relativism’, the latter being
a methodological imperative for all art historians, because it allows them to distance
themselves from the values of the worlds they examine. In his Preface to the French
translation of Becker’s Art Worlds, Menger opposes the same compromise to the
interactionists’ suspected relativism: ‘The controlled decentering of art is what matters’
(1988, p. 15). But what is the founding principle in the name of which we might exercise
this control? This oxymoronically relativistic perspective on relativism deserves to be
probed further, and this is precisely one of the objectives of my investigation of mediation.
28
The title of the French translation of this work – La Norme et le caprice – lays
greater emphasis on the capricious nature of taste than the more circumspect English title
does.
After rebuking those who advocate ready-made causes and know exactly what
they are going to say before their investigation has even begun, Haskell does not
argue that all explanations are relative on the rather trite grounds that there are an
infinite number of possible approaches to an object, which would mean attributing
the diversity of the causes of art to the diversity of its observers. On the contrary,
he explicitly makes a case in these lines for a plurality and heterogeneity of causes
rooted in reality itself. In other words, Haskell grants a precariously intricate
and heterogeneous set of factors sufficient power to explain art works. Adding a
greater, and more coherent, aesthetic or social explanatory principle to this set of
factors would not add anything to their understanding: on the contrary, this would
simply undermine their composition, which is their greatest source of coherence
and, therefore, power. It would simply be a case of mistaking a consequence for
a cause. Although Haskell explains this in several of his works, he articulates his
theory of composite causality most clearly in Taste and the Antique. As a whole,
the statues which he examines in this work raise questions about the relativity
of taste – not about relativity in and of itself, in the absolute, but about the tastes
of art lovers themselves: a relatively small number of statues ‘acquired a quite
special standing, which was often acknowledged (and sometimes stimulated) by
the way that they were displayed’ (p. xiv). Having represented the canon of beauty
for four centuries, their status was eroded by a negative re-evaluation, until they
became what they are for us today: ‘heavily restored Roman copies of Hellenistic
originals’ (p. xiii). This argument bears directly on the status of objects: why is
this art or not? But Haskell’s perspective is diametrically opposed to the outlook
of a metaphysical universe such as Danto’s, for example (cf. infra, pp. 160–62):
Haskell, unlike Danto, does not posit himself as an observer asking metaphysical
questions of objects considered to be ‘the same’, the status of which may only
change through the magic of the subject’s gaze. On the contrary, Haskell conceives
this question in strictly empirical terms: how has the taste for statues changed
throughout history, and indeed how have the statues themselves been transformed,
including in their physical appearance? The example of these statues provides
an ideal focus for this question, which runs through his works,29 insofar as their
appreciation has swung from one extreme to another: they went from incarnating
the absolute itself to being seen as possessing the quaint charms of unmasked
idols. Whereas J. Addison declared the Farnese Hercules one of ‘the Four finest
Figures perhaps that are now Extant’ (quoted p. 254), modern historians now see
it as ‘a huge repulsive bag of swollen muscles’ (quoted p. xiii).
29
Cf. Past and Present in Art and Taste (1987). The title of this collection of essays
implicitly evokes questions such as why some works go from being adulated to being
totally depreciated, and why great painters are regularly met with the hostility of their
contemporaries. The oscillation between the relativity and the endurance of taste lies at the
heart of these questions. However, Haskell of course makes a point of not presenting any
regulatory principle for this oscillation (whether relativistic or absolutist).
To focus on statues which went from being ‘universally acknowledged’ (p. 13)

to historically devalued is to be empirically constrained to analyse them in the
same words, without feeling free to alter one’s register depending on whether one
considers (or does not consider) them to be works of great value. Haskell shows
how variable an absolute judgement may be. In this way, he compels aestheticians –
according to whom statues owe their success to their aesthetic value – to explain
why these works have become devalued. However, having previously shown how
circumstantial tastes become absolute, he also presses sociologists – who are keen
to prove that value is relative by linking the fall of these statues to changes in
taste – to explain how these works were able to withstand these variations in taste
for such a long time in the first place! The stability of objects is as difficult to
explain as the variety of categories which we use to appreciate them. Great works
can fall off their pedestal: transcendent beauty will not shield them from social
contingencies. Conversely, the isolated actions of certain actors, combined with
the hardness of certain materials, and other such partial and heterogeneous factors
irksome to sociologists, were enough to leave the same works standing on their
pedestal for four centuries ….
Haskell’s work derives its power from its balanced assessment of the multitude
of criteria which are behind the extreme variability of taste and the lengthy period
during which the value of the statues remained stable, before entering a rapid and
definitive period of decline. Far from being at the mercy of subjective arbitrariness,
these variations operate under severe constraints. They bear as much on materials
as they do on the categories of aesthetic appreciation. They pass through a large
number of intermediaries, whose combined action alone can explain the successive
increase in and loss of value of these art works. To this end, Haskell and Penny
examine techniques of reproduction and the materials used. They go back to the
origins of the taste for statues, and rediscover the criteria for their evaluation
based on restoration practices; they analyse the mounting debate questioning
the very need for restoration, and emphasise the impact which exhibiting them
had on their value; and they stress the reciprocal influence which the recognition
of canonical works had on the birth of erudition and art history, and vice versa,
while also underlining the personal role played by the likes of Winckelmann.
Although they constantly highlight the circular process through which art works
become constituted as great works, the process they draw our attention to is a
practical operation rather than the hidden impulse of attributing to a social illusion
the power that blind subjects give to their idols. They show the statues as great
because they were copied, commented on, reproduced, displaced and coveted,
and indeed also being all the more coveted for being great. It is worth looking
closely at the mechanics of the interplay which brought about their consecration:
while they came to represent an ideal of beauty transmitted through the influence
of academies and art schools, they simultaneously became privileged objects for
the collections of collectors great and small, public and private: ‘Who were the
collectors, restorers, dealers, artists, dilettanti, scholars and archaeologists who
created their reputations?’ (book jacket blurb).
The classical opposition between being attributed value and having intrinsic
value is cancelled by the spiralling list of tautological causes that Haskell and
Penny oppose to reductive sociological attempts (identifying an object as artistic
is what gives it value) or aesthetic ones (an object’s intrinsic value causes it to be
identified as artistic). This can only be assessed case by case, on the basis of the
specific and more or less successful balance which each one of these causes strikes
between the intrinsic properties of the statues and the intervention of the human
beings who operated around them. Haskell and Penny demonstrate this clearly in
their analysis of museums, where curators chose canonical works and canonised
the works which they chose, from the Tribuna in Venice and the Uffizi in Florence,
to Versailles and the Musée Napoléon in France. Similarly, they show the same
process at work in the politico-artistic behaviour of the greats of this world: their
relentless quest for objects which might symbolise their power itself turned these
objects into symbols of power – however, they did not settle on any old objects.
This process could often take an unexpected turn. Thus, the art lover, Gavin
Hamilton, ‘stole’ a statue from Ostia only to discover that the fact that it did not
bear the Roman stamp of origin meant that it did not acquire value in England (cf.
pp. 67–8). Similarly, an excessively elitist Neapolitan king’s decision to shield his
statues from the degrading gaze of their numerous would-be admirers prevented
their consecration! Likewise, Haskell stops short of condemning the plunder of art
works, as seising art works from their native land was key to increasing their value
and starting them on their journey to fame (as he benignly remarks in his Preface
to the French edition of the book). Haskell and Penny constantly emphasise the
multiplicity and the diversity of the figures on which the success of this process
depended, from travellers, to intellectuals, artists, and aestheticians, and from
literary and artistic giants (Diderot, Goethe), to collectors and art lovers with avant-
garde tastes, not to mention corrupt but efficient and well-informed intermediaries
such as Albani, as well as specialists such as archaeologists, antiquarians, and art
historians – most famously Winckelmann.30
30
Haskell and Penny’s focus on restoration allows them to draw out the role played
by the appraisal of these intermediaries as well as the way in which the appearance of the
statues was constantly changing. Initially perceived as self-evident and unproblematic, the
decision to restore classical statues would eventually be condemned, revealing just how
much the ideas framing their appreciation had changed. Haskell’s and Penny’s evocation of
the treatment of the legs of the Farnese Hercules makes it clear that this wasn’t just because
of a change in the ‘eye’ which looked at a work which had stayed ‘the same’. Instead, this
also had to do with the continuous material transformation of the objects: the classical
Farnese Hercules having been mutilated, the sculptor Della Porta gave it a pair of legs,
which Michelangelo declared magnificent. When the statue’s original legs were eventually
discovered, they were judged less beautiful, and the decision was made to allow it to keep
its new legs. Although its original legs eventually started to be exhibited next to the restored
statue, it was only in the eighteenth century that it became clear to everyone that the statue
should have its Roman legs back.
There is no way that we can start out from the fixity of art objects – in this
case, the statues – and use this as the origin of a history which would then
illustrate the gradual changes that occurred in their viewers. The opposite is true:
far from granting us an insight into the variations of taste, the fact that statues
are understood as fixed is an unintended consequence of the changing frame
their evaluation. This frame used to be exactly the opposite of ours: classical and
contemporary sculptors were placed in a relationship of continuity, the ‘direct’
aesthetic function of the statues (to be pleasing to the eye) took precedence over
their indirect aesthetic function (to conform to their classical model), and a relative
indifference towards the materiality of the statues themselves, compared with the
variety of interests and effects they could generate. In short, the previous frame
of appreciation depended on a systematic confusion between the originals and
their copies: the Roman statues were still immune from the very distinction which
would finally devalue them. This is where Haskell’s and Penny’s argument reaches
its climax, beyond their demonstration of the spiralling dynamic which the taste
for particular art works provoked, turning them into tasteful works of art. As the
range of possibilities offered by copies became wider – as their materials, sizes,
reproduction techniques and costs changed, as well as the scope of their possible
functions – original statues and their copies were more emphatically contrasted
with each other, leading to a simultaneous increase in the value of original works
and the number of copies made – as well as to the aesthetic disqualification of
copies, as the materials used to make them became less precious and stable, and as
making them came to be seen as an academic exercise which great artists refused
to engage in … Haskell and Penny draw out the spiralling logic of the ‘taste for
the antique’. Initially, this taste was relatively independent from aesthetics: it was
close to the taste for relics and included all classical statues as a whole, on the
grounds that they came from Rome. Later, once this taste had led to the aesthetic
canonisation of classical statues, and once these had become artistic models and
desirable collectors’ items, their canonisation in turn provoked a wave of copies,
which itself led to erudite investigations of the originals. Gradually reinstating the
opposition between an original work and its copies, these researches pushed the
statues’ point of origin further back in time, and ‘original’ classical statues were
soon revealed to be copies themselves. This eventually led these Roman copies of
Greek art to be relegated to the same darkened store rooms where our own copies
had already been discarded …. Yet, Roman statues were not replaced by the Greek
originals which had disqualified them: the most widely known classical statues
remain the Roman ones. What they have lost is the privilege of constituting a
universal standard of taste. In Taste and the Antique, Haskell and Penny present
an exemplary case for a seamless history which makes as much room for the
complex material of this period as for its judgements, by reinstating real actors
and paying as much attention to the qualities of its objects as to the way human
beings valued them.
S. Alpers’ ‘Rembrandt’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Mediator
Yet, Laocoon and Hercules are no longer fashionable. Can a balanced history of
art also speak of the great artists whom our modernity has constituted as isolated,
superior, geniuses, guaranteed by their own works?
Alpers’ Rembrandt’s Enterprise31 ran the opposite risk: by focusing on a great
painter, she borrowed from a traditional genre, and one might be forgiven for
wondering whether this signalled a relapse into art historical complacency. Today,
sociologistic perspectives are so dominant that, before they can start to speak of
the art they love, art historians must prove that they are able to recognise the
context of an art work, the importance of institutions for the transmission of artistic
skills, and the collective character of modes of representation. Alpers’ The Art of
Describing (1983) does just this for seventeenth-century Dutch painting, by taking
into account the processes of visualisation which developed in Holland during
that period. Mission accomplished, then. But, one might ask, has she done this
only to return immediately to the star-struck phraseology so often directed at the
great masters? No, she does not: Alpers seeks on the contrary to discuss painters,
painting and society at the same time and in the same terms. Baxandall’s social
reading of Italian painting guided our steps with subjects, programmes, characters,
the language of contemporary commentators, and instructions on who was to
paint a particular work and on the pigments that were to be used. Ginzburg and
Haskell added dynamism to the approach of art works, by reinstating the historical
continuity of the multitude of relationships between the period’s actors and the
uses to which they put art. By this point, the rift between aesthetic and social
analyses of art had been healed. However, there was still a noteworthy character
missing from this panorama: the great artist. In order to move from art to society
without oversimplifying the connections, the artist had to be restored as the maker
of his paintings, understood both as objects and as art works. Drawing attention
to the artist’s capacity to act allows Alpers to show that it is possible to breach the
sacred barrier separating the analysis of the art object from social analysis. In her
book, Alpers takes on the greatest challenges that face the history of art as soon
as one refuses to accept the reassuring confrontation between erudite exegeses of
the works and the restoration of their very varied contextual elements. What gives
an art work its value? Is it possible to analyse genius without falling into either
hagiographic verbiage or awestruck silence?
Structured in a loop, Rembrandt’s Enterprise opens on the problem of the
value of art works. This is an issue that has often been raised over the last few
decades, not without a whiff of scandal, when a series of works was found to have
been misattributed to Rembrandt. To strip a painting of the name of a famous
author is to condemn it to a cruel decline. It is to eject it from the closed circular
31
Cf. Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and The Market (1988). The French
translation, L’Atelier de Rembrandt: la liberté, la peinture et l’argent (1991), locates this
work in a more scandalous, but less corrosive, form of art history.
world where it was overvalued by the market, while its aesthetics were widely
discussed and received the consecration of museums, only to relegate it to the
stock of art works belonging to a school of painting which museums exhibit in
thematic rooms. How should we react when we find ourselves wrong-footed by
the discovery that a lavishly praised painting was wrongly attributed to a great
master? Should we laugh at our predecessors? Should we acknowledge that we
artificially create the rarity of an artist’s talent by isolating his works from those
of his many fellow artists? Or should we decide on the contrary that Rembrandt
inspired a style, and see this as further vindication of his prestige? Or should we
perhaps meditate on the relativity of human judgement?
The misattribution of a painting to a great artist (as well as the existence of
fakes) raises key questions for the history of art, because it crudely raises the
question of artistic value. Alsop touched on this issue with a discussion of the
alleged Grünewald (that Alpers also discusses), which the Cleveland Museum
purchased for 1 million dollars before it was reattributed to another artist. Alsop
approaches this episode in a familiar perspective, wondering why we are not
surprised to be disappointed, although the paintings involved remain the ‘same’.
Invoking the labelled categories on which art collections are modelled, he argues
that we give precedence to artistic rubrics over the works themselves: ‘Yet no one
argued that there was anything in the least odd in these proceedings. “Grünewald”
was the category, and the picture had to be condemned because it did not belong to
the correct category’ (1982, p. 76). Alpers answers Alsop with a subtler and more
persuasive analysis of this episode, based on the argument which she develops
throughout Rembrandt’s Enterprise. In this work, she seeks to re-establish the
painter’s place in the production of his paintings by emphasising the way in which
‘Rembrandt’s own making and marketing of his works’ (1988, p. 3) allowed him to
define the value of his works himself. She argues that the questions that surround
the authorship of some of his paintings should not be imputed to our inadequacy,
but understood as the paradoxical consequence of Rembrandt’s own minute
attention to the issue of authorship in painting. Alpers shows the way in which
he made his works (and those of a few others …) into Rembrandts by inserting
particular criteria into his paintings and everything that surrounded them. She
presents him as a man who made his own name, which the history of art, the art
market and the voracity of museums later took hold of, amplifying it indefinitely.
‘Individual uniqueness, monetary value, aesthetic aura – the name of Rembrandt
summons up different but convergent notions of value’ (p. 2). Modern observers
do not decide on the value of a painting. The opposite is true: they are at the mercy
of the long and slow process through which the collective work of painters and the
art world gradually shape the natural definitions of painting, painters and the truth
of a painting which they inherit. Painters do not merely produce paintings, they
also produce painting – that is, the criteria for its evaluation and the network for its
uses, transmission, and sale. ‘The description of Rembrandt as a pictor economicus
is a construction … but it was a construction he put on himself’ (p. 107). Thus,
Alpers interprets Rembrandt’s well-known portrait of an usurer gasing at his
money as an aesthete might look at a painting in terms of ‘the identification that he

made between two representations of value, art and money’ (p. 88).
With Rembrandt’s Enterprise, Alpers re-establishes the artist as one of the
several mediators of his art, with whom he is in interaction: ‘there is no compelling
reason not to consider the practice and production of art as part of his career’
(p. 13). Hence the provocative emphasis she lays on Rembrandt’s ‘enterprise’
in the title of the book. Alpers retraces the socio-artistic unit that Rembrandt
constituted, with the inextricably interwoven pictorial and social strategies which
he devised: the technique he used to give his paintings a material opacity that
makes us want to touch them, the way in which he organised the activity that took
place in his studio like a theatrical performance, his relationship with tradition and
princes, and his deliberate and strategic decision to privilege the market.
Painting means making paintings: Rembrandt’s first move was to emphasise
the fact that individual paintings are first and foremost material objects, their
surfaces overlaid with opaque layers bearing the visible traces of the instruments
which have produced them. Countering the polished aesthetics of the Flemish
school with its descriptive illusion, and also the Italian conception of painting as
a narrative window opening onto the world, Rembrandt exhibits the materiality of
painting – the work of palette knives and paintbrushes, the grain and the thickness
of the paste. This is why he lays so much emphasis on the hand, that ultimate
tool. He paints Aristotle with a hand on Homer’s statue: for the philosopher as
for the painter, the hand is the privileged instrument for knowing the world.32 She
argues that the emphasis which Rembrandt placed on the materiality of paint
already defined and singled him out as an individual painter during his lifetime,
ensuring the endurance of ‘the isolate self that he invented in paint’: implying ‘a
claim to be distinguished, to stand apart, to be himself. ’ This self ‘was very much
his own invention’ (p. 33). Far from signifying that he was a genius rejected by
society, as the Romantics would claim, Rembrandt’s individuality was the fruit
of the deliberate strategy he devised to ensure that his style would be personal.
Rembrandt was ‘one of the inventors of that individual state. And so his final
works became a touchstone for what western culture from his day until our own
has taken as the irreducible uniqueness of the individual’ (p. 87).
Rembrandt’s second move was to present painting as a theatrical performance.
What does Rembrandt paint? Actors. He is like a stage director directing groups
of students on the stage as they mime scenes, ‘represent[ing] life as if it were a
studio event’ (pp. 80–81). He does not copy classic scenes from old painting, but
reconstitutes them in his studio. When he ‘rehearses’ the same scene several times,
he shifts his perspective, ‘recording’ it from different angles. The simultaneously
32
The same is true of surgeons: Alpers notes that in the celebrated Anatomy lesson of Dr
Tulp, which shows the surgeon pulling with his pincer on the corpse’s tendons while raising
his left hand, the raised hand does not suggest a traditional rhetorical gesture, but mimes the
movement of the hand generated as he tugs on the tendons on the hands of the corpse.
theatrical and pictorial meanings of the word ‘representation’33 did not simply
conjure a pun, as when these genres started to diverge from each other. Instead,
this overlap emphasised the profound similarities between these two activities for
Rembrandt, who ‘moved away from depicting actions to offer the act of painting
itself as the performance we view’ (p. 32). Alpers develops her argument with
Rembrandt’s many self-portraits: could there be a better way to say that the painter
is an actor than by showing him looking at himself play-acting in front of a mirror,
tracking his every expression in order to paint it? According to Alpers, self-
portrayal constrains an artist to behave like an actor: ‘the artist-actor is meant to
learn from a model, that of his own body, which he himself can never see – except,
that is, if he turns, as Rembrandt was (therefore?) to turn so often, to make a portrait
of himself using a mirror’ (p. 39). Rembrandt paints himself painting himself, in
the same way that he paints his studio, emphasising that it is painting itself that
we are looking at. He also draws attention to this with his choice of subject matter.
Take Judas, or Samson’s wife, for example: both are impostors whose thoughts
do not match what they are – a disciple, a wife. In other words, they are actors,
technicians of representation. Rembrandt does not paint them in order to indict
them on moral grounds, but because he is interested in the act of representation:
this is what was already at stake in making painting itself visible in paintings. The
same applies to the technique of actors – their capacity to express feelings with
their gestures and faces – that he privileges in his studio and in his subject matter,
and when he looks at himself in the mirror, or depicts Judas prostrate at the feet
of the Pharisees. This theatrical model allows us to overcome the temporal gap
which separates us from the paintings, whereas the Romantics’ opposition of artist
and society increased this divide. From the subjects depicted in his paintings to
their viewers (including us) – and to Rembrandt himself – everyone is involved in
a performance. Rembrandt is not so much a creator as an actor in this long chain
of representation.
Rembrandt’s third move was to use his studio to make a decisive reappraisal.
With the world a theatre and representation the task of the actor and the painter,
Rembrandt no longer needed to worry about mastering the world: instead,
mastering his studio was all he needed to do in order to succeed. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, he refused to travel to Italy, take up a position in the entourage of
a prince or at court, or marry up the social ladder in order to consecrate his success.
Rather than using painting as a ticket for social success, he wished to turn painting
itself into a social value. Alpers gives an extraordinarily insightful interpretation
of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jan Six, which depicts an impatient city official putting
his gloves on, about to head for the door: the old-style patron cannot stand being
made to wait as Rembrandt interminably touches up his portrait. The painter is
there to serve the model, in his view. If the model is going to be made to serve
33
Conversely, the theatre ‘paints’ our feelings, and this is what Rembrandt expected
from his models.
painting, then he shall simply leave. How does Rembrandt turn this defeat around?
He paints the patron’s departure: ‘Time, gentlemen, please.’
This leads us to Rembrandt’s fourth and final move, according to Alpers:
his decision to opt for the market. This is not to say that Rembrandt dithers
romantically between two ready-made paths, only to take the heroic decision to
choose the market’s judgement over the favours of the powerful. On the contrary,
having taken the risk of locating the origin of the value of paintings in painting
itself, rather than in patrons’ networks, he must create a market for them by forcing
customers to accept to pay the price. If the hype on which this extraordinary strategy
is based evokes the modern techniques used in today’s art market, it is because it
anticipates them. Rembrandt collected many works. He also bought his own back
at high prices, including all his etchings. He contracted many debts and declared
himself bankrupt, which was itself a very modern thing to do – bankruptcy is a
management strategy, freeing up creditors and restarting the credit process. What
can we make of the dangerous financial strategy that Rembrandt devised in the
land where capitalism was born? Rembrandt thought that if people wanted his
paintings, they had to pay the price for them. It was him they were buying. This
was not a metaphor: he paid his debts with his paintings, and lo and behold, people
were giving him unlimited credit in the hope of acquiring one of his paintings. He
mortgaged his paintings. Whereas the purchase of a painting used to be based on
human interaction, it was now mediated by the movement of goods: the man to
man relationship that used to underpin such transactions had been displaced by a
dynamic man to goods relationship. A seventeenth-century painter thus created the
contemporary art market.
We have now come full circle in Rembrandt’s Enterprise. At present we have
all the evidence we need to explain why we have mistaken so many of Rembrandt’s
students’ paintings for his own. Why have we not used the term ‘school’, as we
did for Renaissance artists or for Rubens, to speak of the works produced in his
studio? Alpers explains that this is because Rembrandt did not produce a style, so
much as Rembrandt himself. It was his painting that had value and this could not
be imitated: his students had to either make their own name, or pass for him. Thus,
the number of paintings attributed to Rembrandt started to rise after his death. This
was the extraordinary posthumous victory of a man who genuinely encouraged
the artists working in his studio to opt for a genre which effectively involved
copying his self-portraits! ‘How can there be a copy of a self-portrait? … the
interesting question is not really philosophical at all, but rather about the diffusion
of self’ (p. 120). What can we make of the oxymoron that is a self-portrait made
by another? It is a portrait of the artist as victorious self. Up until then, the value of
painters had been tied to the gratitude of those who were in possession of genuine
social values, as illustrated by the strategic decision that Rembrandt’s colleague,
Bol, made to stop painting once he was able to make a good marriage. From
Rembrandt onwards, however, the value of art would be exclusively located in the
paintings themselves, signed with the name of their painter, which now came with
a price tag, thanks to him.
The first generation of social historians of art did not examine art works
closely enough to go beyond making the tedious assertion that their hypotheses
were well-founded, but not entirely convincing. Alpers showed that the social
history of art could focus on an artist without ignoring his greatness and genius,
and without assuming that these qualities were at odds with calculation and social
determination. Being a great artist went hand in hand with being a great merchant
for Rembrandt, whose novel strategy involved rewriting the social definitions of
painting, and whose publicly acclaimed success depended on doing much the same
as many others in seventeenth-century Dutch society: taking out an unlimited
amount of credit based on material objects.
The History of Art’s Fortunate Prohibition
No longer locating the source of art in the art work (by simply framing it as
beautifully as possible) or in society (by making it the origin of all artefacts,
which becomes no more than its flattering reflection), the history and the social
history of art could now take mediation on board. As they focused their research
on what actors do to implicate their relationships in objects, they paved the way
for the restoration of the mediators in the other spheres of life where human
beings and things construct interlocking representations. Restoring the mediators
of art abolishes the distinction between signs and things, and brings out the local,
heterogeneous and specific dynamic of continuous recomposition which projects
the instability of our relationships onto ‘lasting things’ (Durkheim), in turn giving
our relationships some of their density. How do we constitute the world which
constitutes us? Analysing mediations leads to a theory of the establishment of
things.34 Art exemplifies this process, when it comes to understanding how human
beings create things.
It was in language that the social sciences – and Durkheim – found a medium
that was radically, and ideally, insubstantial. It now seems that we may be better
advised to approach the question of social representation, and the objects negotiated
by social representation, from another angle – indeed, one might even be tempted
to say that approaching it from any other angle would be an improvement, since
this would necessarily bring greater focus on the close imbrication of matter and
the ways that human beings work it. Technique, the media and art all raise the
same question as language: how do things come to have meaning? The media
emphasise meaning, while technique highlights things: thus, focus on the media
favours the sociological, while focus on technique favours awkward naturalistic
interpretations. Art lies in between these two domains. Like the media and the
34
The French word ‘instauration’ says it better, in stressing the existential, rather
than institutional, status of the process by which things are ‘called into existence’, to quote
Souriau: see Étienne Souriau, ‘Du mode d’existence de l’œuvre à faire’, Les différents
modes d’existence 2009/1956.
products of language, and unlike technical objects, it has close affinities with
social interpretations: even at the two extremes of transcendental or naturalistic
aesthetic perspectives, it is not possible to forget that art is made by human beings
for human beings. However, whereas signs are obliterated in the linguistic reading
process, the opacity of the materiality of art resists dissolution.35 Art wrong-foots
emblematic interpretations as much as it does natural readings: it is not just a thing
in itself, nor does it simply stand in for something else. Art is and always will be
a mediator.36
Aestheticians solved this conundrum by proclaiming the conditional autonomy
of art, freeing it from mediation: ‘Far from a simple oversight … the lack of
mediation, which can sometimes find brutal expression in Adorno’s writings,
is not a rhetorical formula but a conscious stand. This is not a “shortcut”, but a
deliberate attempt to think outside of mediation.’37 Seeking ‘a two-dimensional
criticism in a one-dimensional society’, Marcuse similarly said: ‘I see the political
potential of art in art itself … Art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social
relations. [It] both protests these relations, and transcends them’ (1979, p. ix). But
this autonomy was illusory: it wasn’t long before it led to either a transcendental
aesthetic subject or the election of the art object, promoted to the status of sole
master of its destiny. The paradox of theories pleading for the autonomy of art
works and freeing them from mediation is that they end up presenting sociological
explanations with a ready-made, homogeneous and tidy set of objects that they
can manipulate as they wish. Whether art encompassed or was encompassed by
society, and whether it was its effect or its cause, it was all the more open to
external sociological explanations the more the proponents of its autonomy had
managed to circumscribe its domain. Adorno ultimately acknowledged this, but
the magic of dialectics nevertheless allowed him to glorify the very impossibility
35
Aesthetic theories constantly invoke this resistance to refuse sociologistic
interpretations. Adopting a Kantian position, M. Bakhtine thus criticises ‘a special general-
aesthetic conception’ – ‘material aesthetics’ – which is ‘conceived from the standpoint of
linguistics’: ‘Material aesthetics is, at it were, the working hypothesis of those movements
in the study of art which pretend to being independent of general aesthetics’ (1990, p. 262).
36
The dramatic U-turn which Hauser made, when he felt compelled by his critics to
cast the social history of art aside in favour of aesthetic questions, is emblematic of these
‘contradictions’: ‘The work of art not only means, but is something and remains a sort of
fetish’ (1982, p. 463). No sooner has he acknowledged the object, than he starts invoking
fetishes! This is immediately followed by the return of repressed problems: art is ‘a sort of
fetish which owes its inexplicable effect to its peculiar existence, which is mixed up with
its meaning but is independent – sometimes alienating, sometimes beguiling’ (ibid.). Such
are the pleasures of dialectics!
37
Makarius (1975, p. 193). In this article, entitled ‘Adorno et le viol de la médiation’
(‘Adorno and the Rape of Mediation’!), Makarius seeks to rationalise sentences such as:
‘The dissonances (in Schoenberg’s music) that frighten them (the listeners) speak of their
own situation; for this reason only are those dissonances intolerable to them’ (Adorno 2006,
p. 11).
of art: ‘socially the situation of art is today aporetic. If art cedes its autonomy, it
delivers itself over to the machinations of the status quo; if art remains strictly for-
itself it nonetheless submits to integration as one harmless domain among others’
(2004, p. 310).
The history of art addressed this issue very differently. It restores so many
mediators, sometimes to the point of losing sight of the object. As a result, we
can’t see the wood for the trees. It claimed neither the opacity of things-as-signs,
nor the transparent clarity of signs-as-things. As L. Marin shows, in an attempt to
free the theory of representation from semiology, signification is the product of
accumulated layers of opacity.38 An art work’s material – as well as the manner
of its style, format, grain and frame – are all extremely important: far from
simply deciphering the sign which these things embody by moving beyond them,
interpreting an art work must take them into account, because they powerfully
shape and inflect the sign which the work represents.39 Whereas, with Durkheim’s
sociology, the intermediary zone that lies between signs and things is emptied of
its mediators, with the history of art, this zone is filled with hybrids, things which
signify, and signs which are inseparable from their materiality.
To the linguistic model of interpretation (where objects are understood
in binary terms as screens which are simultaneously transitive – what do they
show? – and reflexive – how do they shape what they show?), the history of art
opposed an unspoken prohibition: it did not allow itself to cancel out any mediator.
This prohibition prevented it from engaging in the most common operation that
we use in order to make generalisations: relating an object, once it has been
transformed into a mediator, to the cause it represents. This strange prohibition,
which resulted from the history of art’s attempt to foil both aestheticist and
sociologistic discourses, meant that it systematically opted for a middle of the road
position. This prohibition was, in my opinion, extraordinarily fertile: it allowed art
historians to reject generalisations, which obliterated the specificities of objects,
in favour of a model of art-specific generalised particulars. This inverted the
relationship between those who create representations and what they represent,
by privileging the specificity of each representation over representation in general.
What mattered each and every time was always this or that particular painting. This
38
Marin takes pleasure in unravelling them, turning his attention to the material
and means of display of art works, as well as to the walls, and to the ways in which
paintings are exhibited and viewers positioned, etc. Having recalled ‘the two – transitive
and reflexive – dimensions of the sign-as-representation’, he justifies his ‘persistence in
privileging the exploration of the modes and modalities, and the means and procedures, of
the presentation of representation … and (his) attention to the presentational devices which
make pictorial representation possible and efficacious, such as the frame, the setting, the
plane of representation, etc’ (1989, p. 10). The programme which he outlines for the history
of art thus focuses on restoring the mediators of representation.
39
Danto also acknowledges this, in the heat of the moment, despite ostensibly arguing
otherwise, cf. infra, p. 162.
meant taking into account everything about a painting: its material, its location,
the gestures which produced it, those who presented it, ‘showing it showing’,40
and those who named it, attributed it to someone, sold it, bought it, exhibited
it, reproduced it, admired it, destroyed it, etc. In other words, the history of art
needs the proliferating number of human and material mediators to stay there:
their indispensable presence41 is the paradoxical condition of its representation.
This involves not so much the substitution of one signifier for another, as their
addition. One object still always stands ‘for’ another object: but rather than taking
its place, it is at its service.
40
L. Marin (1989, p. 10). See also the L. Marin lines quoted at the start of Chapter 2
p. 45, and this other quote: ‘All representations present themselves representing something’
(1989, p. 55).
41
G. Steiner (1989) strongly advocates the Real Presences of art, but is unfortunately
too often content with advocating the old days, when people still believed ….
Transition
Linear Causes or Circular Causalities?
There emerges a dialectics of internal and external, of inside and outside: clay,
congruent to excrement contained in the body, is used to make pots containing
food, which will be contained in the body, until the body, relieving itself, ceases to
be the container of excrement.
C. Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter, 1996, p. 177
Two Modes of Explanation of the Relationship of Art and Society:

A Circular Principle versus Rectilinear Causes
Art as mediator/the mediators of art: the polarity between these two

propositions illustrates the contrast between the two types of causality which
have been invoked to relate art to social causes. The first of these propositions
operates through substitution: it replaces the causes which art objects
attribute to themselves with their real – social – determinants. This leads to
a straightforward process of disclosure: unveiling the causes of art in order
to turn it into a social artefact presents a direct challenge to aesthetics, as
well as to the beliefs of the actors. The second of these propositions operates
on the basis of a given object, and relies on the contrary on aesthetics or
history – which have become its natural complements – for a stable account
of the characteristic traits of art, which are then correlated with social factors,
before possibly suggesting the existence of more or less partial and reciprocal
relationships of causality. These two trends differ most markedly at the level
of their theories of interpretation (as well as in their tone and their general
rhetoric). The first turns the social into a global, generic principle, on the basis
of which the object under study can be reconstructed. It is aggressive, invasive,
and less meticulous than the second. It explores the relationship between art
and society by pitting one cause against another, according to a totalising,
circular and asymmetrical causality: the explanation begins and ends with the
social, having passed right through the artistic objects:
First cause: Explained effect:
social art
Figure 5.1 A global, circular causality
Attempting to avoid what she calls the Scylla and Charybdis of reductionism
and pure art, V.L. Zolberg looked at the points of common accord between the
sociological perspectives on art, in order to synthesise their different perspectives.1
She described this method as ‘Studying the art object sociologically’ (1990, ch. 3).
In contrast, the scope of the second trend – which Zolberg summed up in these
words: ‘The art object as a social process’2 – was more modest and limited: it
was less about ‘the’ social, than about a series of social factors, which possibly
determined some of the art object’s characteristics through their role in its modes
1
1990, p. 12. Unlike Becker, in other words, she did not so much seek to bypass the
debate on whether the causes of art are internal or external as she wished to emphasise the
complementarity of these approaches. ‘(The) two camps have more in common than many
let on. Taken together, if properly used, their approaches are capable of complementarity’
(ibid.).
2
Ibid., ch. 4. Such chiasmic oscillations are ubiquitous, especially in generalist
sociological literature. See for example Duvignaud’s ‘Theatre in society, and society in
theatre’ (1973b, ch. 1), or Hauser (1982), ‘Art as a Product of Society’ (Pt II, ch. 5) and
‘Society as a Product of Art’ (Pt II, ch. 6). J. Blacking is also very fond of these inverted
formulations: he contrasts ‘Humanly organised Sound’ (ch. 1) with ‘Soundly Organised
Humanity’ (ch. 4), and ‘Music in Society and Culture’ (ch. 2) with ‘Culture and Society
in Music’ (ch. 3). His thought developed along typically ethnological lines, leading him
to switch from a linear to a circular model, as he went from studying the impact of social
influences on music, to the notion that the social is music, and vice versa. In a reader
on the critical sociology of music (White (ed.) 1987, p. 259), he explicitly summarised
his thesis with the following invocation of inversion: ‘My approach can be caricatured by
inverting some of the phrases in this volume.’ In a rather charming spirit of playfulness, he
took the mechanical and – to his mind – excessively sociologically unilateral phrases ‘the
social character of music’, ‘the social nature of symphonic life’, ‘the sociology of musical
structure’, and replaced them with ‘the musical character of society’, ‘the symphonic nature
of social life’, and ‘a musicology of social structure’.
Linear Causes or Circular Causalities? 155
of production and distribution. This is what Duvignaud reluctantly acknowledged

when he asserted that the second objective of the sociology of art – after the
general investigation of ‘a sociology of artistic expression’ – was to study ‘the
social environment and the changing functions of art’ (1973a, pp. 17 and 95). This
was also what Bourdieu vigorously rejected in the lines quoted on p. 48, n. 11,
violently opposing the linear separation of the production of an art work from
the social analysis of its consumption. Such a positive attempt to ‘determin[e]
the social factors of cultural practice’ (1990b, p. 139)3 played on the external and
objective characteristics of local relationships, taking them as they came. Only an
empirical approach could allow for the hypothetical formulation of partial, linear
and reciprocal relationships of cause and effect, between realities that were a priori
equal and independent. Arguments born of this approach considered factors rooted
in positive and accepted phenomena (art, society), explaining one in the light of
the other.
Possible causal variable Explained variable

(one among others)
a specific social factor a specific property of art
Figure 5.2 Partial, linear causalities
From Principles to Practices …
These two trends were very much at odds with each other at the level of their
principles: the one’s reductionism, indifference to the works, and the other’s
untheorised empiricism led them to vigorously anathematise each other, this being
the point of their isms.4 Yet, we have seen how their stances were less clearly
divergent, as their concrete analyses came to accumulate heterogeneous results, and
drifts through the theoretical frameworks on which they founded their explanations
less and less coherently. What exactly is at stake when one emphasises the role that
merchants and critics play in contemporary art (Moulin 1967), or the importance
3
Duvignaud and Bourdieu used the same phrase in the original French (‘détermination
des facteurs sociaux’) to describe this sociological stance, which they both distanced
themselves from, although for the opposite reasons: Duvignaud did so in the name of art’s
creative impact, and Bourdieu because its lack of attention to the field of production left
intact the ‘belief’ in the artist as ‘uncreated “creator”’ (1990b, p. 139).
4
‘Too sensitive and lucid to allow himself to be misled by deterministic grids,
Gombrich illuminates his subject, he doesn’t oversimplify it’ (text on the jacket cover of
the French translation of Ideals and Idols, L’Écologie des images (1983)).
of patrons and humanist advisers for Quattrocento Italian painting (Haskell

1963–80a)? As the perspective shifts from general principles to specific analyses,
the clear binary opposition between two antithetical modes of causality gives way
to local relationships which are specific but whose causes have an uncertain status,
being implicitly regulated by the sometimes contradictory theoretical frameworks
associated in the explanation, depending on the stage of the argument. Factual
imprecision versus theoretical vagueness: this is the alternative at the heart of the
old debates between sociologists and historians.5
This parallel hinted that the different types of causality invoked in works
which mostly emphasised theory and adopted a global critical perspective, and
those which were overwhelmingly historical and favoured positive and partial
causes, would not be neutrally motivated. However, this was only a general trend:
the erudite, relativistic brand of history (‘historicisme’ in French) had always been
challenged by the proponents of historicism (‘historisme’ in French), who believed
that history has sense and meaning6 and who were even keener than sociologists
to invoke the most general of causes. Conversely, sociologists influenced by
ethnomethodology or interactionism created a general theory of the absence of
general causes. In the field of art, these different stances can be summarised thus:
Circular causality Linear causalities

A global theory The sociology of culture Interactionism
Historical analyses The social history of art The history of art
Alternatively, if one prefers names, they can be summed up in this way:
Circular causality Linear causalities

A global theory Bourdieu Becker
Historical analyses Hauser Haskell
5
Cf. ‘Historiens et sociologues aujourd’hui’, Société française de sociologie (1986).
6
A.-C. Taylor gives a clear account of these different stances in ‘Les modèles
d’intelligibilité de l’histoire’ (in Descola et al. 1988, p. 156), opportunely recalling
(note 1, p. 189) their historical and philosophical background, as well as the debates
surrounding the words themselves (Anglo-American scholars, and Popper in particular,
use the word ‘historicism’ for what the French call ‘historisme’; conversely, Gombrich’s
French translators translated his evocations of ‘historicism’ as ‘historicisme’, rather
muddying the waters!).
When Art Works are More Intractable than Their Interpreters …
Investigations of art are not simply tributary of the debates between sociologists
and historians. Scholars have had to speak about the solid and enduring objects
that artists produce, if only to admit their incompetence or demand the right to
stay silent. Art works are both historical productions open to the investigations
of social scientists and rich, complex, products endowed with a great capacity
for self-definition, which have left social disciplines perplexed when they
lacked the tools with which to grasp them. The intractable resistance of art
works has constrained social scientists to choose between the two types of
causality discussed above: as a result, their explanations oscillate between
one and the other, not just at the level of theory, but at all the levels of their
arguments, from the more general to the more localised, allowing the contrast
between these two types of causality to structure most of the oppositions
which I have evoked above. The genetic programme of the circular model
implies that, at one point or another in the argument, the art object will have
to be attacked, destroyed and turned into something other than what it says
it is. In contrast, because it combines the causes which art attributes to itself
with those of its own inventory of social causes, the linear model tends not
only to accept the art object, but to reinforce it by giving it additional reasons
for being.
The two poles of the theoretical relationship which social scientists can
establish with the art object – criticising it/rationalising it – being rather
unsatisfactory, few have endorsed extremist stances. The complex task of
marshalling critical arguments has often forced them to reluctantly mobilise
a greater variety of causes (and of types of causality, in particular) than those
which their explicit model allowed them to invoke. This also meant that, the
closer their concrete analyses brought them to the objects themselves, the
greater the number of fine distinctions there were between scholars whose
broad choices had seemed fairly close to start with. In Figure 5.3, I have
organised the interpretations of art by articulating them around not one,
but two oppositions: the first bears on the elected cause: it is the horizontal
opposition between society and the art object; the second bears on the type
of causality which is invoked on the basis of that choice: it is the vertical
opposition between an internal and global type of causality, and an external
and partial type of causality.
Electing a general principle,

subordinate phenomena
Society Object
the murky waters

of mediation ...
Partial causes
Given phenomena,
external and instrumentalised
correlations
Figure 5.3 The Object, the Social, partial causes: a triangle

enclosing mediations
Let us say, in order to continue to try and sketch out these complex
mechanisms, that research in the history of art has clearly shown three simple – all
too simple – ways to avoid taking mediation into account: electing a privileged
cause for art; invoking a superior principle, which allows for the reconstruction
of the relationships and objects encountered ‘in reality’, and may itself be focused
either on the social or the object; or, on the contrary, opting for the empirical
acknowledgement of a priori autonomous phenomena, and establishing only
external, partial and instrumental correlations between them. Either the causes of
art take over and substitute themselves for heterogeneous phenomena, reducing
the object to the social or the social to the object, or they are so weak compared
to empirical phenomena taken as given, that the work of interpretation is confined
to rationalisation. Art-intermediaries-society: having delimited each one of these
terms beforehand, such analyses arbitrarily explain their dynamic interconnections.
There is no longer any mediation.
Conversely, the mediations of art resurface whenever art works are analysed in
detail without bringing predetermined causes into play, but showing instead how
each one of the factors at work (in the fields of the social, the object, and their
terms of engagement) is the product of others which it simultaneously actively
produces. Mediation surfaces like the return of the repressed in my overview of
the sociology and the history of art. I have neither criticised nor endorsed the
clear-cut theoretical stances which I have presented (sociologistic vs aestheticist
discourse, positive empiricism vs critical theory, relativism vs determinism,
etc. …) but merely looked at the way the critics’ own works give the lie to their
initial stances. When taken together, these works tell a story diametrically opposed
to the one suggested by the direction of the arrows in Figure 5.3. I started from
three – typically unmediated – clear but incompatible aestheticist, sociologistic

and empiricist positions, each of which portrays a world which leaves no room
for the others:
• an aestheticist discourse, which presents a world where art works exist

independently of the social and have no intermediaries;
• a sociologistic discourse, which develops global interpretations, ignoring
the art works themselves and their concrete mediators;
• an empiricist approach, which privileges the erudite investigation of all
the possible intermediaries of art (patrons, merchants, salons or academies,
pigments, formats, programmes or commissions, etc.) but is unable to say
anything about the art produced or the society which produces it.
Yet, retreating from these three extreme positions where the causes of art are
intermingled, the research that was initiated in the light of each one of them has
gradually returned to a murky zone, restoring the intermediaries at work in the
actual art world with their heterogeneous statuses (social, institutional, human,
material, etc.), and, more importantly, increasingly assigning them more active
and productive roles. Neither passive agents or instruments of higher causes,
nor channels of transmission between an art and a society considered as realities
external to one another, these intermediaries have become genuine mediators:
they define the relationships between art and society (including the possibility
of independent relationships) as much as these define them, and establish their
causes (aesthetic categories, the norms of a milieu, taste, the market, the function
of mediation itself, etc.) as much as these are their causes.
However, there is no adequate theoretical account of the relationship of art
to the social, of society’s relationship to art objects, or of the types of causalities
which art involves. Is it possible to go beyond this sort of general reciprocal
dynamic where everything defines everything else?7 The problem poses itself in
the same terms so long as there is no clear way to solve it without resorting to
the one-sided oversimplifications of sociological or aestheticist discourses, or of
the empirical accumulation of data. This unresolved issue obstinately resurfaces
in the texts which are the least open to it, as they explore the two key questions
underlying the interpretation of art:
7
In his conclusion to the Marseilles conference on the sociology of art, Passeron
remarked, with humour and not without a tinge of nostalgia, that ‘We now observe the
existence of agreements in principle which derive from those research methodologies
and advances which have resisted changing weather patterns and fashions. Even more
surprisingly, stances which have remained at odds and conceptual tools that were originally
incompatible now cohabit relatively cordially, as a result of the fact that theoretical choices
that were once superciliously considered foundational for scholarly research now refer
scholars back to better-informed views’ (Moulin (ed.) 1986a, p. 455).
• They must define a relationship between art and society as part of

their argument.
• They must define the art object relatively to the means, material formats,
technical media, human intermediaries, institutions and social mediations
which it needs in order to exist in objects, places and concrete realisations.
It is in these moments of theoretical generalisation that the notion of mediation

reappears, returning to the surface with an insistence which seems worth noting.
Mediation is what must account for the relationship between objects and the
social, sometimes providing an answer to a question, or – as is more often the
case – evading it, as though merely invoking it magically settled it.
The Return of Mediation
Having turned to Durkheim for a firm stance on the social interpretation of

‘cultural mediators’ (which temporarily led us away from the field of art), let
us now conclude our exploration of these interpretations on two amusingly
symmetrical examples of the return of the repressed mediators in theories of art.
Let us start with ‘poor Hauser’ – as Bourdieu condescendingly called him8 –
who settles the role played by ‘Mediators, Art criticism, Institutions of mediation,
Trade …’ in the artistic production line in 10 of his 600-plus page work (1982,
‘En route from author to public’ (Part IV) clearly illustrates the linearity of his
argument). The word ‘mediation’ keeps rearing its ugly head in these few pages:
there is something a little odd about the way Hauser insists in repeating it, only to
confine mediation to the artist’s need to be understood (automatically citing music
as an example, by the way):
No matter how spontaneously … the artist may unbosom himself, he needs

interpreters and mediators in order to be properly understood and duly
appreciated. He has need of a whole series of mediators and instruments of
mediation. (p. 462)
A. Danto’s work on The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) is another,

more interesting, example of this phenomenon. Unlike sociologists or social
historians of art, this analytical philosopher and art critic can be accused neither of
being ignorant about art nor of refusing to acknowledge it, nor indeed can he be
charged with refusing to acknowledge it because he is ignorant about it … He is as
deft at wielding his pen as he is at unravelling the mysteries of contemporary art.
Looking at pastiches, Borges’ Quixote, the stunts Marcel Duchamp and John Cage
8
This was partly because he was ‘among the standard whipping-boys of the champions
of pure aesthetics’ and partly because he deserved it … cf. Bourdieu (1993b, p. 141).
pulled off, and the actes gratuits of contemporary artists who declare the most
banal of objects to be art, Danto reverses the usual philosophical perspective on
art. An art object cannot be defined by its aesthetic character, as other objects also
share this feature. Instead, repeatedly confronting ‘two seemingly indiscernible
objects’, one of which is artistic but not the other, he argues that it is not matter, but
interpretation that makes something artistic: the ‘intensional structure’ that takes
hold of the object (1981, p. 179). Although it may appear iconoclastic, Danto’s
argument is in fact unexceptional, even when one takes into account that his thesis
is ‘transfigured’ by his in-depth knowledge of the art world and sparkling analyses
of a large number of examples. His theory of what it is that makes something
into art is limited by the dualistic terms of his approach: if art does not lie in
the object, then it must lie in intention. With the same analytical rigour, Danto
refuses to consider what goes on inside the head of the viewer (the fact that
something is art does not depend on the effect the object has upon the viewer),
while also rejecting explanations based on artistic conventions, and accounts such
as Dickie’s (1974), which give an institutional definition of art (the possibility
of interpreting something cannot be decreed). Danto’s argument is in fact very
far from labelling theory, despite the fact that Becker pays Danto homage,
grateful to him for giving examples which seem to back up his own argument.9
Danto is as far from presenting a global sociological answer to the question of
the relationship of art and society – unlike Bourdieu, who resorts to notions of
‘field’ and ‘relative autonomy’ to answer this question – as he is from proposing a
constructivist solution focused on the conventional guidelines of milieu, profession
or market. Indeed, the popularity which he enjoys with sociologists rests on a
misunderstanding: they mistake his refusal to attribute an aesthetic dimension to
objects for a sociologistic acknowledgement of the collective mechanisms of the
attribution of value. But this is not the case: this refusal comes from the emphasis
Danto places on subjective interpretation.
Danto refuses both to declare art impossible to define, like Wittgenstein, and to
give this question a relativistic answer: he believes that there comes a point when
it is not arbitrary to call something art. What, then, is it that makes something
into art, according to him? His hesitation is interesting, in terms of the status of
mediation. His very subtle argument is profoundly asymmetrical. Ever rigorous,
Danto forbids himself from locating art in a property of the object. Instead,
he asserts that what makes an object artistic is the possibility of interpreting it
as art. However, the status which he gives to interpretation is subject to great
variations. Like a good philosopher, he does not at first accept that interpretation
may depend on historical factors (Danto 1964). Yet, in The Transfiguration of
the Commonplace, his argument evolves towards an open-ended contextualism,
9
Emphasising this reversal of perspective (art is born of the artistic gaze), Becker
(1982, p. 149) refers to the notion of ‘art world’ that Danto develops in an eponymous
article (1964, p. 580).
or historical attributionism, linking this possible interpretation of art to specific

historical and cultural conditions, before acknowledging that contemporary art
has reached a point where anything is possible: art is dead, if not in terms of
production, at least in conceptual terms, as an object of philosophical enquiry. The
very rigour of Danto’s logic presents us with a powerful ab absurdo demonstration:
his hesitation over the status of crucial yet wildly subjective interpretations is the
price he has to pay for not having a full theory of mediation which would include
the capabilities that objects have.
But this is not all. Although his contextualism and his refusal to make the
materiality of objects the reason they are artistic both bring him close to sociology,
Danto nevertheless chooses to make the intention of the artist the only thing that
makes an object artistic. At the end of his book, Danto turns to works created ‘in the
style of …’ and examines the question of style in the same terms: why is something
art, but not something else, when both objects are materially ‘identical’ – but what
do these words mean? The way in which he formulates this question is steeped
into the very problematics of the object which he denounces. The theoretical frame
which he adopts is as alien to the notion of mediation as could be: there is nothing
‘between’ the object and society. Developing this argument to its logical end, he
ends up making the absence of mediation the very criterion of art. This is a boon
for us, since it seems that all anti-sociologistic thought is opposed to mediation:
one would be hard-pressed to think of a better way to emphasise that, conversely,
the sociology of art always involves the restoration of the mediators of art. Danto
only has one – moralistic – way out of this conundrum: opposing spontaneity
to calculation, the human to the codified, the truth of primary, direct, immediate
artistic creations, which give us an insight into the self, to the facticity of secondary,
external ‘artistic’ creations which rely on making and knowing, and refer to other
people. Danto argues that the mystery of style is that it must not be born of reflection,
and that copies can never recreate an original work: ‘we can connect it [style] to
the kind of relationships entailing the absence of a mediating knowledge or art’
(p. 206). Genius, according to him, lies in this absence of mediation.
Yet, a close reading of Danto’s (beautifully written) work for signs of the return
of the repressed mediations of art, yields the satisfying discovery that, having just
defined art as negation of artistry (for human beings) and as negation of materiality
(for objects), he nevertheless ends up celebrating a multitude of mediators:
I am referring to the palpable qualities of differing lines made with differing orders
of styluses: the toothed quality of pencil against paper, the granular quality of
crayon against stone, the furred lined thrown up as the dry point needle leaves its
wake of metal shavings … It is as if, in addition to representing whatever it does
represent, the instrument of representation imparts and impresses something of its
own character in the act of representing it. (p. 197)10
10
This passage evokes the superb chapter which Focillon wrote ‘In Praise of Hands’
So, matter has intentions? These lines read like an afterthought: mediation is what
constitutes art, in the space between gestures and things. How beautifully Danto
sketches this notion out, and how briefly he evokes it, leaving us aching for more.
(1989, pp. 157–84), the fleshly and mechanical mediating roles which this organ plays
inspiring him to propose a strict definition of artistic ‘technique’.
Chapter 6
The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals
The “return to origins” is always a modernism as well.

M. de Certeau 1988, p. 136
A classic example of the transmission of music through its objects is to be found in

the recent evolution of musical tastes which the new interpretation (i.e. historically
informed, faithful to the sounds of early music) of Baroque music constitutes, as
opposed to its traditional (i.e. modern, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century)
interpretation. There are now two musics where once there was one: in other
words, there are two different ways of connecting the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to the twentieth and twenty-first, each of which activates a different
mode of musical transmission through time:
The wish to rediscover a sense of historical authenticity was [not] fundamentally

responsible for the new relationship … between interpreters and early music.
Those who went “in search of lost sounds” [wished … to communicate
with the music of another period not just through its transmitted forms, but
through the very noises which this music made. (Beaussant 1998, pp. 16–17,
Beaussant’s emphasis)
But was the trend for historically informed interpretations of early music really
motivated by the desire to rediscover ‘lost sounds’ and remove the confusing
screens separating us from this music, in order to allow us a more direct insight
into sounds which time had stifled? Far from taking us back to the original purity
of unmediated, direct sounds, this trend exhibits a general return to mediation: it
opposes a relational understanding of Classical music, which takes all of its media
into account, to excessively objectified definitions of music, which consider it to be
a fixed object. Neither the rediscovery of lost sounds nor the reinvention of early
techniques of interpretation based on closer readings of musical treatises, suffices
to explain the differences between these two trends. Having such a perspective on
these two different ways of interpreting Baroque music amounts to placing them in
the same box in record shops, as though they constituted rival versions of the same
given object. The proponents of historically informed performances of Baroque
music do indeed use different instruments from those used by their ‘Modern’
predecessors, but the difference between these two trends’ interpretations of early
music extends beyond the technical aspects of its performance. Instead, they affect
its entire montage. The Baroques seek to regenerate the geography of musical
relationships: when they play, they speak of overtures, pathways, dances. They
understand music as a relationship forged through an instrument and a score,
which in itself is only an elusive trace. Whereas Classical musicians play what is
written down – for them, music is found in scores, transmitted objects which have
their history and their institutions – the Baroques use what is written down as a
movement, a means to an end. The former play an opaque score, the latter pass
through a transparent one in performing their movement.
Understood in this perspective, the conflict is one where the Baroques oppose
the product of the open-ended list of musical intermediaries advocated by
Classical musicians, refusing to accept the closure of the musical repertoire, to
which the latter have become wedded, in their fierce bid to outperform each other.
The Baroques systematically question the instruments, the scores, the interpreters,
the voices, the number of performers, the chords, the relationship of this music
to speech and dance, its fusion into a total spectacle, and even the musicians’
gestures – the posture which allows them to play fluently without loosening their
hold on their body and their instrument, as well as the attitude which makes it
possible for them to forget their anachronistic audience and resume the musical
‘conversation’ between musicians and music lovers.1 There is no better way to
challenge the notion of music as a face-to-face encounter between a subject and
an object than to argue that it is a relationship. Yet, we will eventually see that
this oversimplifies matters. The history of music can only reconstruct its past (and
thus conceive of its present) if its archives are reliable enough to allow its past to
be written down. Revivals too need objects. Recordings are to the Baroques what
scores are to Classical musicians. Paradoxically, the Baroques’ project to bring the
forgotten instruments of early music back to life depends entirely on the work of
the disc that keeps a silent record of breathing, gestures and movement. It is the
silence of this major modern musical technology which has made it possible for
early musical techniques to speak again.
On the one hand, we have a musical repertoire, on the other, we have a taste
which had forgotten this repertoire but is now laying claim to it. The period during
which we were cut off from the Baroque era, opening a breach between two
centuries, can also be approached as an experimental opportunity presented to us
by history. For once, it is not up to us to analyse the relationship between music
and its audience: the passage of time dissolved this relationship, but now allows
us to see how musicians themselves (artists and their audiences) have rebuilt it.
Starting from either the present or the vestiges of the past, the Baroques have
managed to bridge the gap and restore that relationship to an exemplary level,
bringing this forgotten music closer to us. The controversies they stirred enable us
to recreate and restage this restoration.
1
Cf. L’Art de toucher le clavecin, by François Couperin (1716).
The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals 167
A Quarrel about Musical Authenticity
How should early music be played? The richer the history of the Baroque has
become, the more complex this debate has become. The dispute started along
quasi-disciplinary lines: its various protagonists started by hurling rather
aggressively phrased definitions of the truth at each other. The musicologists
articulated their position in more or less the following terms: the archaeological
research of musicologists have allowed us to gain a good insight into the way in
which early music was played. These insights tell us what not to do, if not what to
do, and give us a general sense of what might constitute an authentic performance.
We understand this to be a performance which is in accordance with the historical
sources: music should be played ‘as it was at the time’. However, the musicologists
conceded that this was only what should ideally happen, and emphasised that their
position left contemporary interpreters with plenty of room for using their own
initiative. The tenants of modern interpretations of Baroque music developed the
following counter-argument: this is the twentieth century. Tastes have changed,
instruments have developed, and our ear and sensibility are no longer those of
a Marquis at Versailles or a bourgeois from Leipzig. The truth of Bach’s music
does not lie in an illusory attempt to be faithful to its historical origins, but in its
capacity to be performed anew with our modern instruments and techniques:
No matter how it was done in the Church of St. Thomas, a performance of the
St. Matthew Passion done with meagre means sounds pale and indecisive to the
present-day ear … and thereby contradicts the intrinsic essence of Bach’s music.
(Adorno 1967, p. 144, in ‘Bach defended against his devotees’, pp. 133–46)
This is a debate about music theory, understood not in the sense of ‘a minim
equals two crotchets’ but of a genuine theoretical question: what is the love of
music about? Initially this debate itself totally ignored mediation. According to
musicologists, contemporary interpreters and music lovers had to allow themselves
to be governed by an eighteenth-century musical sensibility. They saw no reason to
take music lovers into account, and they left them in the dark – like the audience at
a concert. The twentieth century is absent from their inquiry into Baroque music.
Seeking to reconstitute the taste for a vanished music, the musicological approach
ignored our consumer century in an attempt to be faithful to productive centuries.
However, the ‘Moderns’ argued on the contrary that whether we like it or not,
our century is necessarily the point from which we lay claim to the repertoire
of early music, according to our needs. Privileging the tastes of contemporary
music lovers, the ‘Moderns’ side with consumers in this polemic, unwittingly
adopting a sociologistic stance: contemporary tastes create the objects of the
past. Contemporary audiences impose their laws (even if this is only through the
merchants who woo them) onto a malleable object, which is only ever what they
want it to be: they revise the eighteenth century for their pleasure, much as the
nineteenth century reinvented the Middles Ages in the image of Romanticism.
Is early music an object from the past, or is it a contemporary repertoire? The

difference between these two perspectives illustrates the oppositions between
production and consumption, by giving them a temporal dimension. The disjunction
between past music and present audiences, as defined positively by musicological
and ‘Modernist’ principles, also distinguishes between different disciplinary
approaches, on a theoretical – rather than musical – level of interpretation. This
attempt to reconstitute the past involved an active involvement in historical
research. By contrast, sociologists faced with this revivalism spoke of the way
in which the present lays claim to the past. The question remained the same, but
each of its two sides had been harnessed by a rival in the competing approaches
of musical knowledge: had the twentieth century modestly gone in search of the
‘real’ eighteenth century, or had it created its own made-to-measure eighteenth
century, in order to reinvigorate today’s music market? Bourdieu, for instance,
clearly opted for the second interpretation, when he based his understanding of the
problem on a critique of the first:
One might predict that the most “informed” public would continuously move …
towards modern, and increasingly modern, music. But there are reversions …
and renovations – Baroque music played by Harnoncourt or Malgloire. This
leads to cycles exactly comparable to those of fashion in dress, except that the
period is longer. This would be the key to understanding the successive styles
in Bach interpretation, from Busch to Leonhardt, through Münchinger, each one
reacting against the preceding style. (1993b, p. 115)
Two Musics instead of One
What exactly was at stake in this controversy? Once again, as so often in the
history of music, a ruthlessly polemical debate raged between the ‘Ancients’ and
the ‘Moderns’ – although this time it was not that clear who was who in this
quarrel – as, especially since the 1970s, musical works dating from the end of the
seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries (particularly Bach’s), were reinterpreted,
using period instruments, children’s voices, a pitch lower than the standard concert
pitch (A = 440 or 450 Hz) of symphonic orchestras, and more generally a general
sound that is more tenuous and discontinuous, has a ‘swung’ rhythm, and abounds
with accents, bellows and rests:
The first blow to Bach’s mythical reputation dates from the moment when
aestheticians recognised that his music bears all the characteristics of the
Baroque. Initially, this scandalised audiences. (‘Bach aujourd’hui’, p. 200, in
A. Souris 1976, pp. 199–203)
After a fierce but relatively brief struggle (in France, this period only lasted from
1975 to 1985, or thereabouts), Bach’s new interpreters were declared victorious.
Their triumph was as evident in concert halls as it was in the media and in
recordings: the articles printed in music journals, the radio programmes broadcast
on France Musique, summer music festivals, music retreats, concert programmes,
and – even more importantly, perhaps – new recordings and compact disc sales,
all proclaimed the dominance of these former renegades, who no longer tolerated
being dubbed the ‘Baroqueux’. As J.-M. Damian remarked, barely 15 years on
from the first scandals:
These interpretations are no longer controversial today … On the whole – should

this be cause for regret? – “traditional” interpreters and their audiences have had to
give way on the entire musical repertoire until the 1750s or thereabouts. Only the
most illustrious pianists (Brendel …) dare to play Bach in a recital now.2
Predictably enough, the last stage of the process which led to the victory of the
Baroques coincided with the return of doubt. Thus, once at the top of his career,
W. Christie was able to move on from the necessary dogmatism of pioneers,
declaring that ‘When it comes to rhythm, I am now infinitely more flexible than
I was ten years ago’.3 Their success also coincided with accusations that they
had sold out, and the nostalgic yearning of a few purists for the true spirit of
their tentative, uncertain beginnings. There were even some whose ambivalence
towards success was such that they wished to revolutionise music anew: had
the Baroques really managed to undermine traditional conceptions of Classical
music? Or, could it be that Baroque music had simply become the new face of
Classical music, since it was able to reign unchallenged over captive audiences
and revitalise the market for discs once it became institutionalised, and once its
codes, landmarks and star performers became well-established enough to feature
on concert and music school programmes?
For me, the Baroque meant a loss of stability, an end to certainties. It meant a
certain attention to the complexity of music, as opposed to its simplification.
There are many layers to French music, it is multidimensional and should not
always be taken at face value. Multiple perspectives, a succession of different
planes: that’s what makes the Baroque, and this is not something that can be
synthesised. Now there are more and more harpsichordists, but they’ve lost track
of this flexibility. They’re fighting in a marketplace, they are laying claim to this
musical field, but very few of them allow for any sense of space. Their work
is very good the first time you hear it, but the second time, it feels as though
you’ve heard it all before. The movement has lost it creative, revolutionary
2
‘Préface à la troisième édition’, Dictionnaire Diapason des disques et des compacts,
Fayard (1988, p. IX). The choice of the musical interpretations mentioned in this dictionary
of discs had already been drastically revised since the first edition, published in 1981.
3
In the book of interviews which J.F. Labie devoted to him (1989).
edge. (Interview with a performer and conductor renowned for his rigour and
honesty, 1990)
Now that this tide of renewal has become sufficiently well-established for the
Baroques to lay claim to well-known musical pieces, and now that pianists have
reasserted their right to play Bach after having initially retreated from the debate,
we find ourselves in an amusing predicament: we are now faced with two musics
instead of one. In art historical terms, this situation recalls the case of Viollet-le-
Duc’s cathedrals. Nevertheless, there are not many examples of this type, a large
number of past and present conditions needing to be filled for such situations to
arise. What a stroke of luck for scholars to find that reality is confronting us with
such an experimental situation: impossible to simulate artificially, this situation
allows a full-scale comparison between two modes of musical transmission. The
first of these modes of musical transmission is based on human practices handed
down from one generation to the next: although these practices are always open
to betrayal, they are nevertheless ‘living’. The second of these modes of musical
transmission is direct and based on objects: this discontinuous and authentic –
but ‘dead’ – process of archaeological reproduction is founded on the scholarly
interpretation of the messages that our ancestors left behind them, a few centuries
ago, through media which have withstood the passage of time, whether this was
fortuitous or deliberate.
When Music Does Not Coincide with Its Objects
Musical objects are absolutely central to understanding the precise procedures

which led to the disappearance and reappearance of a particular musical form,
if we wish to focus on the practical modalities of changes in taste, as opposed to
deep causes which might lie behind these changes. What is at stake here is not a
philosophical investigation of art’s abstract capacity to go beyond its immanent
realisations and subjective perceptions, but a very concrete question: what survives
of a musical form once it has been forgotten, if not precisely the almost corpse-
like objects which it has left behind? These traces include a residual scattering of
ambiguous, dead or mute material: instruments, buildings, a few images. For the
most part, however, they are constituted of a very large number of written sources:
musical scores, but also theoretical, practical and literary texts, as well as archival
documents which give us information about practices, concert programmes,
judgements, tastes, modes of transmission and teaching, while also telling us what
the polemical questions of the time were. We had to wait for Edison for sound
recordings. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the instrument-
and-musical-score duo became a trio with the addition of the disc. At last, with the
disc, ‘music itself’ becomes one of these solid, enduring, objects: the disc made it
possible to capture the materiality of music without having to resort to a written
code, as recordings overtook written records. After Debussy, it has always been
possible to turn to mechanical recordings of musical sounds themselves, to solve

questions relating to the more or less authentic restoration of the way in which
another period performed music.
What makes the case of Baroque music so interesting is the double interruption
of its material and human transmission. This is not the case with ethnomusicology:
even though a tape recorder captures the materiality of a piece of music in this case,
there is an extreme disjunction between the ethnologist who is the music’s receiver
and the musician who is its transmitter, in terms of the shared codes which give
music its meaning. Conversely, this is not the case with Classical music either. Its
original sounds will never reach our ears, but are presented to us (in the strongest,
temporal, sense of the term) by an uninterrupted tradition of performance. This can
lead us to forget that it has indeed been transmitted to us, and therefore altered: today,
what we hear is not so much Beethoven, as Karajan …. In contrast, Baroque music is
twice removed from us. Because it dissociates what is generally inextricably linked,
and because so little of it remains, this music invites us to confirm our Durkheimian
attempt to stabilise our relationships with objects and project our relationships onto
them: at the moment when we bring this vanished music back to life, we have no
choice but to place ourselves at the mercy of the outcome of our predecessors’
(editors, instrument-makers, etc.) prolonged attempts to produce lasting traces
of music. What are lacking are all the other, more human, forms of transmission
which usually accompany these attempts, helping us – even if we can’t exactly
measure their importance – to decipher objects while also creating the impression
that understanding them is a straightforward process, and that objects are music, or
that moving from objects to music is merely a question of technical competence:
as though recovering this music depended simply on the ability of musicologists
to establish a clear text, as well as on the capacity of interpreters to place the music
at their fingertips and in their heads (reversing the gymnastics involved in the
codification of music), and finally on the skills deployed by sound engineers to bring
this music into our homes.
The history of the way in which a repertoire was recaptured after lying forgotten
over a period of time that was long enough for all traces of its oral memory to
vanish, making it impossible to rely on the way the musical tradition transmitted
it, allows us to see that this period of oblivion had a centrifugal effect on the
various objects created by and for Baroque music. It distinguished between the
ephemeral and the lasting, in a process which was the opposite to the logic which
led to the Baroques’ return to favour. The twentieth-century Baroques seized
on these objects in various manners, and at different moments. Far from being
comprehensively rehabilitated, along with the music of which they constitute the
traces, musical scores, instruments, treatises and various other sources seem to
have been seized upon or rejected one by one. Either they were greedily brought
back and adopted without changes, or their return met with fierce resistance, and
they were intensively transformed and rehabilitated. As they were recalled to our
attention only as and when this or that new interpreter of Baroque music needed it,
these objects formed a sort of centripetal spiral centred on the new practices ‘their’
music demanded. I wish to restore this strange dynamic, because, by working in

the opposite direction, it drew attention to the usually invisible logic linking music
and its objects.
Much more limited and precise registers of causes need to be brought into play
in order to overcome the tension between social and aesthetic theories. Only this
will make it possible to establish the connections between the forms that Baroque
music now takes and this dynamic of disavowals and returns to favour, as opposed
to granting the music in question the curious position of being both the subject and
the passive witness of its own evolution. However, in order to do this, we must
comply with the following methodological imperative: taking all the mediators of
music into account – i.e. all those who have played a role in this dynamic, whether
at the level of the transmission of this ‘new’ music or at the level of its reception.
Only on this condition will it be possible to follow up the many intertwined
threads connecting a repertoire with its audience, and avoid indefinitely oscillating
between a social logic where taste creates music, and an aesthetic logic where
beauty creates tastes.
A Lesson in Taste
We are invited to a lesson in taste: the point of this lesson is not to reduce taste to
its object, but to make us realise that this object is radically insufficient to explain
our relationship to music. ‘One must speak to him [the listener] in a language
he understands if he is to be moved by what he hears.’4 We lend our ear to
music – I like the way this phrase makes it sound as though music were akin to the
Trobriand’s necklaces – expecting to experience a pleasure which is inextricable
from the pleasure of this expectation. Music involves a gap, a postponement: there
is no certain reward for the expectations we invest in it. Music is ‘an intention to
believe which is devoid of any content’ (Schaeffer 1966, p. 656). It is made up of
‘expected frustrated expectations’.5 It always relies on the listeners’ predetermined
consent. Modelled on M. de Certeau’s definition of belief (1981),6 this consent
relies on a long series of interconnected validations: I am familiar with the
composer, genre and interpreter of the music; so-and-so told me that it was good;
I read about the three ‘cellos’ or four ‘fortes’ awarded to this disc by my favourite
4
It is therefore not ‘the physical power of sounds’ that is at work here, according
to Rousseau in On the Origin of Language (1966, p. 60): ‘As much as one might want to
consider sounds only in terms of the shock that they excite in our nerves, this would not
touch the true principle of music, nor its power over men’s hearts’ (p. 59).
5
Pavel (1986, p. 158), on Jakobson’s (1960) theory of ‘rhythmic pleasure’.
6
That is to say, not in the weak, negative sense (which is also hostile to mediation) of
a collective illusion which must be denounced, but in the strong, positive sense (which is
entirely based on mediation) of a relationship to the world mediated by a large number of
‘validations’, which must be ‘counted on’.
magazine; I recognise its jacket’s yellow or red border; a sales assistant I’m happy
to trust advised me to get it, etc.
We do not spontaneously love music we know nothing about, whatever
Romantic notions of elective affinities may suggest: writing about such affinities
is always a retrospective process, which only starts once we already love
something – more specifically, once musical tastes based on recognition turn a
particular music into its own validation. We love the music we are ready to love,
or indeed the music we already love to love. A close analysis of the moment when
we elect to love a piece of music reveals the superimposed statuses of the musical
object: during the brief interval when we are not sure what to make of a piece
of music, characteristics which we will soon resolutely attribute to the work’s
intrinsic properties, on the one hand, and to the reliability of our own personal
judgement, on the other, fluctuate uncertainly, dissociated from each other, as we
hesitate between endorsing and refusing them. And meanwhile, even with music
we usually love, there are brief moments when we can suddenly hear a piece of
music as though it were a thing because tiredness or hostility prevents us from
giving it our full attention: suddenly, it becomes an unbearable series of arbitrary
sounds and artificial effects, an empty carcass.7 The strange noise has to stop at
once, and we have to postpone listening to it again until we are ready to lend it
what we expect from it: music will surrender itself to us on this condition. For
now, however, it constitutes a naked object. The contrast between this object and
the beloved music we usually feel it as, emphasises just how much we usually
dress it up in order to enjoy it.
The reinvention of Baroque music allows us to separate out all the strands that
we weave together in order to make a piece of music be ours.
Competing Forms of Mediation
How are we to fill out the two-century long gap that separates us from the music
of Versailles, when all that remains of it are the rare and ambiguous objects which
Classically trained music lovers initially refused to take in? This gap brings
musicians and sociologists together: musicians wish to bring a dead repertoire
back in touch with living music, while sociologists seek to understand how living
forms of music give rise to the rigid structures which hold them together. Faced
with the archaeological problem of reconstituting a lost music from traces which
have survived the passage of time, today’s musicians must gather a certain number
of objects in order to fill the void which this music has left behind. The list of
7
Adorno gave an evocative account of this moment of hesitation, but projected it onto
others, as though it constituted a lack: ‘the so-called unmusical, who does not understand
the “language of music”, hears nothing but nonsense, and wonders what all the noise is
about’ (p. 160).
these objects provides sociologists with radical evidence of the varying degrees
of resistance to the passage of time which music has given the objects and media.
Let us start by asking what these objects are, in the most archaeological sense
of the term. Neither that numerous, nor that easy to decipher and bring back to life,
these objects are: damaged instruments, contradictory treatises, musical scores
on which everything has not been written down, as well as a few other written
or sketched traces, registers indicating the number of performers for a given
piece, programmes, performances. These objects have become rarefied because
of a disruption in the tradition which would normally ensure their continuous
interpretation, while also disguising them from us because the know-how, the
tastes, the performance and listening habits, the techniques and the devices which
produce music flow so seamlessly through these material formats. However,
strictly speaking, we can only gain an insight into early music which hasn’t been
performed for a long time, through the voluntary or involuntary attempts which
have been made to inscribe it on ‘lasting things’8 while it was a living music.
These musical media – which seem both numerous and unequivocal when the
musical tradition which they stem from is alive – suddenly start to look like the
fragments of bone, tools and tombs that archaeologists dig out. They become rare,
they turn into inexplicit remains, coded clues to continuous practices which have
vanished and which we must rediscover, deducing them from a few traces left
on objects: instruments, inscriptions, monuments – i.e. tools, written documents,
stones. Going back to a time before recording techniques were invented brings
us face to face with the traditional ways of using objects in order to record and
institutionalise. Since Baroque music no longer exists in itself – things are different
in the case of rediscovered paintings – we have to go back in time in order to
retrace the steps which this music took to project its fleeting sonorous reality onto
the durable and solid structure of matter, and bring this process back to life by
starting from the congealed traces which it left behind. Before long, however, the
attempt to bring this process back to life starts to overrun the limits of such an
archaeological account, which reduces musical mediation to its material media and
considers Baroque music to be no more than a historical object to be reconstituted
on the basis of its remains. Musicians do not give the same definition to their
object, and the questions which arise from their confrontation with the material
fragments of the musics of the past which have survived do not touch on their
historical, but on their musical, interpretation. What do they add to the research
of musicologists, whose discipline is itself often suspected of being as dead as
the manuscripts which they work on? They persist in systematically harnessing
musical mediations, one after the other. They seek to rediscover the way Baroque
music was originally played, as well as its sensibility, its posture and its gestures.
They try to define its famous sound, and to reconstitute the framework for, and the
rules of, its interpretation on the basis of its conventional notation. They train new
8
The phrase is Durkheim’s, speaking about the totem’s ‘mediation’ of collective
feelings. I quote these words in the epigraph to Chapter 1, p. 15.
interpreters to learn how to use early instruments, which are themselves copied and
reintroduced to their repertoire. They also work on audiences, refashioning their
tastes. And so on, and so on: the list of the polemics and controversies surrounding
these processes is longer and more drawn out than even the most optimistic of
sociologists might have dreamt … As it went through the various stages of its
development, the movement for historically informed interpretations of Baroque
music restored the mediators of the musical world in vivo, doing in practise what
I wish to do in theory.
The debate was further complicated by the existence of the nineteenth century
between the age of the Baroque and the twentieth century. Long before the
Baroques, nineteenth-century musicians had already reclaimed part of this music’s
forgotten repertoire. In particular, they restored the mediators of the musical world
of the preceding century in their own way, introducing all the elements of their
own musical world into the repertoire of Baroque music. Ranging from nineteenth-
century instruments (starting with the piano and the symphonic orchestra, neither
of which existed in the eighteenth century) to nineteenth-century performance
techniques, phrasing and conceptions of rhythm, to taste, concerts, sound, etc. these
elements fitted their own definition of music. Those who favoured the traditional –
i.e. nineteenth-century – interpretation of Baroque music, systematically revised
it: this was their spontaneous and rather unquestioning response to the problems
raised by the gap separating their own music from the written documents which
this early music had left behind. Unilaterally adapting Baroque music to modern
performance techniques, they reduced it to its ‘notes’. As N. Harnoncourt noted,
this policy of bringing an early musical repertoire up to date had the rather amusing
consequence of giving rise to two contradictory approaches to its performance.
Either the early texts were revised, in a spirit of Romantic effervescence which led
them to rewrite them extensively,9 or, with a reverse excess of zeal, they adhered
so strictly to written sources that they neglected the style of Baroque music,
consigning to oblivion its ornaments, unequal rhythms, expression, etc. – i.e. the
very soul of this music – because they were not written down, and had disappeared
for that reason:
To put things simply, we spent decades earnestly reading and performing the
whole of Western music according to the conventions of the age of Brahms.
This led to two fundamentally different conceptions of music. Although they
9
There are many other, intermediate, ways of updating an early repertoire, from
the compositions which Mozart, Schumann and Brahms wrote in the manner of Bach’s
fugues, to Gounod’s Ave Maria and to the works ‘of’ Bach/Busoni, not to mention Brahms’
transposition for the piano of the difficulty of the ‘chaconne’ for unaccompanied violin (5th
movement of Partita II in D minor, BWV 1004): he instructed that it should be performed
with the left hand only. Interestingly, all these musical updates complemented the work of
early composer with the signature of a contemporary artist. (On the nineteenth century’s
uses of Bach, see Fauquet and Hennion (2000)).
were at the opposite ends of the spectrum, these two conceptions of music were
based on the same presuppositions, and indeed paradoxically on the same state
of mind, whether they added the “missing” indications to the Baroque repertoire
(nuances, expression, tempos, numbers of performers), or whether their desire
for “authenticity” and “objectivity” led them simply to only perform what was
written down. In contrast, what we want to discover, is what musical notation
means. (Harnoncourt 1985, pp. 44–45)10
Whether these attempts at playing Baroque music added to it or detracted from it,
their common stance toward updating early music differed significantly from the
position of the new, twentieth-century, interpreters, who sought to historicise this
same repertoire. Whereas the traditional – i.e. ‘Modern’ – interpreters’ musical
position relied on the present tastes of their audiences, the new interpreters of
early music – i.e. the Baroques – adopted a genuinely musicological stance: they
wanted to play this music the way it was performed at the time. However, instead
of confining their musicological approach to the silence of libraries, they extended
it to musical practises themselves. In contrast, and retrospectively, the traditional
Romantic interpreters of early music now appear like unwitting precursors: we
now think of them as the first proponents of ‘Modernism’. Indeed, ‘Modern’
interpretations were forced by this controversy to become more explicit. Refusing
to abide by diktats ordering them to be faithful to the early texts, they invoked a
definition of music other than the one suggested by historical objects: this was an
aesthetic – indeed anti-musicological – definition, which followed in the footsteps
of Adorno’s rather aggressive comment that ‘Justice is done to Bach not through
musicological usurpation but solely through the most advanced composition’.11
This definition sprang from the musical categories which were developed in
the nineteenth century, before the time when they had to be justified. When the
twentieth-century controversy surrounding Baroque music started, those who
repeated this definition continued to invoke these categories as a justification,
while also explicitly evoking technical advances and contemporary tastes, and
making ironic and rather disparaging asides about musicological research. In other
words, the only possible recourse open to those who wished to move on from
historical definitions of music – that is, to start from the music itself – was to
10
A simple comparison between Louis and François Couperin’s manuscripts is
enough to show that the Urtext of early music cannot be read like modern scores: indeed, it
would make no sense to give the same reading to two early scores which were only 50 years
apart. Whereas Louis’ scores include a few minims in each stave and demand to be heavily
ornamented, François’ are written out in detail – although they do in fact require to be
ornamented, this must be done according to the intricate rules which the younger Couperin
tried to impose. Souris gave a similar account of the 1920s quarrel which pitted revisionists
against the ‘musicological reaction’ of purists: ‘For fear of making erroneous additions to
the text, it was performed as is’ (1976, p. 51).
11
In ‘Bach defended against his devotees’ (1983, p. 146).
appeal to the tastes of contemporary audiences: what really mattered, for them,
was these audiences should enjoy this music, rather than adhering scrupulously to
the form it had once taken.12
Significantly, the quarrel which pitted the proponents of these two
interpretations of Baroque music against each other for a few decades led musicians
to develop arguments which were in every way parallel to those which were
invoked in the scholarly disputes opposing the partisans of historical approaches
and the proponents of sociological perspectives. For some musicians, the trend
for historically informed performances of Baroque music was motivated by the
desire to rediscover the truth of early music and its historical context, while for
others what was at stake was the music world’s self-interested attempt to reshape
the contemporary music market at a time when disc sales were falling, when
Classical music had become ossified, and when the dogmatically closed outlook of
contemporary music – as well as the scientistic naivety of the experiments which
it conducted in its subsidised laboratories13 – made it incapable of taking on board
the demand which younger audiences made for the renewal of the taste for, and
the practice of, art music.
A Modern Tradition, an Old Innovation …
In summary: interest in the composers of Baroque music, and especially in

seventeenth-century French musical classics, was almost completely non-existent
until the end of the nineteenth century. This music thus lay forgotten for more than
a century. The first signs that it was generating new interest came from:
• The great Romantic musicians, who following Mozart’s lead, started to lay
claim to carefully chosen musical predecessors: thus Mendelssohn invoked
Bach and Handel, and his celebrated reinterpretation of St Matthew
12
The sociologists’ can easily overdo their innate tendency to side with the present
over the past. Thus, in ‘The blasphemy of talking politics during Bach Year’, published
in a reader which establishes a critical sociology of music (Leppert and McClary 1987,
pp. 13–62), S. McClary’s examination of the trend to reinterpret Bach’s music almost leads
her to argue that the early repertoire should be liquidated: ‘(My problem is not that) we are
spending too much of our finite energies on a repertory 275 years old (a consideration that
does, in fact, motivate me to some extent)’ (p. 60). Dismayed by her own audacity, McClary
then refers her readers back to Adorno: ‘“Authenticity” has become a marketing catchword
in this new mass culture industry, (in which) obsession for technical and technological
perfection obscures careful interpretation of the music itself’ (p. 57, note 51). This leads
McClary to a disconcertingly slick conclusion: somehow, she manages to argue that
Leonhardt and co. – i.e. the devout perfectionists that Adorno explicitly attacked – were in
fact Adorno’s disciples: ‘One can hear enacted (in their performances) the strains to which
Adorno points’ (p. 61, note 60).
13
Cf. P.-M. Menger (1989).
Passion at the 1829 Berlin Singakademie’s Easter concert paved the way
for Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, and several others. Similarly, Berlioz
commented enthusiastically on Rameau:14 the master of orchestration was
electing a great precursor.
• A few isolated pieces, of course: celebrated pieces such as the Tambourin,
the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Four Seasons, and The Cuckoo,
as well as – a few years later, and for similar reasons – works such as
Pachelbel’s Canon, Albinoni’s Adagio,15 or Charpentier’s Te Deum.
• For nationalistic reasons, French musicians such as d’Indy, Debussy
or Migot attempted to step out from under the shadow of Germany’s
musical accomplishments, by resuscitating works composed by French
harpsichordists and organists during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis
XV, lost behind those of Couperin and Rameau. Following the publication
of ‘revised’ re-editions of their works by Durand, French composers such
as Debussy and Ravel reclaimed this musical heritage and paid homage to
it in their own works. Nevertheless, the works of these seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century French composers were seldom performed in public.
For instance, audiences remained almost entirely unaware of Rameau’s
musical output, beyond the Tambourin and the dances in Les Indes
galantes, which hardly represent Rameau’s 30-odd lyrical works. And yet,
Rameau was lucky, compared with Lully, Delalande, Dumont, Charpentier,
d’Anglebert, Marin Marais, Leclair and others ….
• Although Vivaldi and other Italian composers of Baroque music were
rehabilitated even later, they rose to popularity more quickly.
On the whole, Baroque music was slow to recapture audiences before taking off in
the 1970s and 1980s, when reinterpreting this early music became the focus of a
specialist musical milieu. Nevertheless it is striking to see both how suddenly and
comprehensively this music disappeared, and how relatively easy it is to pinpoint
the period when it vanished: the last time the Paris conservatoire gave a prise to a
harpsichordist was in 1798. After 1750, an entire repertoire which had enjoyed the
greatest critical and popular acclaim up until that point, collapsed in the space of
14
This is what he wrote about Castor and Pollux: ‘There are very few pages in
Gluck himself which surpass Telaira’s celebrated aria “Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux” …
Everything about this aria makes it one of the most sublime creations of dramatic music.’
However, the previous (magnificent …) scene between Telaira and Phoebe (‘Où courez-
vous!’) seemed ‘very weak’ to him: ‘There is an infinite difference between such recitatives
and those which Gluck wrote just a few years after Rameau’ (‘Castor et Pollux. La partition’,
Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, IXe année, 1842, no. 46, pp. 442–3).
15
This piece, in fact, was composed in 1957 by the musicologist R. Giazotto, only
vaguely inspired by some notes by Albinoni. See the full story in Hennion (2009, p. 115f.).
about 20 years,16 swept away by the wave of stylistic renewal which culminated
in Galant music, after a brief period of transition led by composers such as Gluck,
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach or Leopold Mozart.
Yet, the notion that Baroque music collapsed completely before being
comprehensively rediscovered should not be adopted wholesale. This notion is
partly the product of the way the modern re-discoverers of this music rewrote
the past.17 Musicographists could challenge even a nuanced account of the
disappearance and reappearance of the repertoire of Baroque music with a more
complex picture by pointing to a continuous series of counter-examples. Such an
account would emphasise the existence of specific traditions, especially among
organists.18 It would also recall that before the twentieth-century interest in
Baroque music began, there had already been numerous attempts to look to the
past in order to establish musicologically accurate interpretations. These attempts
ranged from A. Choron’s in the early nineteenth century, to those of F.-J. Fétis and
the pianist C.-V. Alkan, and to those of Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger.
More generally, drawing this more complex picture would involve showing
that, in fact, there almost never was a time when musicologists lost sight of the
repertoire of Baroque music. Far from invalidating my argument, the fact that a
large number of different intertwined historical threads link us to the names of
given seventeenth-century individuals, conjuring different pictures depending on
the disciplinary trends or milieux that gave rise to them, suggests on the contrary
that the dynamic which I am outlining is exemplary, and is not confined to the
scope of the present time, to which I have limited my discussion.19
Why did Baroque music fall into such a sharp decline, and why was its
twentieth-century renewal so popular? Even when we rewrite changes of taste
with hindsight, it is clear that they have been significant, particularly concerning
seventeenth-century French music: we must find a sufficient explanation for these
variations. Is it possible to account for these changes by departing from approaches
16
‘Early French music has been suffering for the last two centuries or thereabouts
from a period of disaffection which is as radical as it is unfair’ wrote R. Fajon (1984, p. I),
recalling the enormous success that French opera enjoyed from Lully to 1730, during which
time 27 composers created 122 operas in 55 librettos – where Lully reigned unchallenged
over that century if we base its operatic ‘hit parade’ on numbers of reprises: Thésée (1675),
Atys (1676), Amadis (1684), Roland (1685), Armide (1686), Thétis et Pélée (by Colasse
1689), Phaêton (Lully 1683), les Fêtes vénitiennes (by Campra 1710), etc.
17
Although the importance of such re-discoverers is now a familiar notion in the
history or art (cf. Haskell (1986), supra pp. 138), this is not really the case yet in the history
of music. See Campos (2000).
18
Thus, J. Cheyronnaud remembers his organ teacher telling him that his own organ
teacher, when he lived in provincial France in the 1930s, still refused to ‘put his thumb under’
[to play scales more fluently, like on the piano].
19
Cf. the works of C. Himelfarb (1990), R. Taruskin (1991) or, on the specific case
of Rameau, those of C. Massip on the different editions of his works (1987), and those of
D. Pistone on their reception in nineteenth-century Paris (1987).
which merely list the social conditions which were their necessary causes, but
always fall short of providing a sufficient explanation for these changes? Such
a break is, in fact, absolutely necessary for those of us who cannot be satisfied
with the external and universal ‘factors’ that never fail to be invoked in accounts
of the relationship between music and the social sphere. Indisputable as they are,
these factors are nevertheless equally uninteresting, because they obey a circular
logic, and are too general to be discriminating – e.g. the music of the century of
the bourgeoisie is bourgeois music … It is easy to guess that arguments explaining
the decline of Baroque music will centre on the fall of the monarchy, the rise of
the bourgeoisie, changes in tastes, and the transformation of concerts and of the
relationship between professional musicians and music lovers. Conversely, the
present revival of this music is likely to generate arguments focused on the return
to the past, on the nostalgic perspectives on modernity which prevail in periods
of doubt or crisis, on the flight from contemporary art, on the will to step outside
the fading framework of the Classical repertoire. This is all fine, but leaves open
the question of why one or other piece of music came under the spotlight, rather
than another?
In order to answer this question, I will focus on a specific and limited case:
rhythm. The idea behind my focus on rhythm is that it is a simple component
of music, at least in terms of technical exposition, but one whose analysis may
be easily transposed onto other dimensions of music, such as pitches and their
vertical and horizontal combinations – which have themselves led to the most
sophisticated account we have of the laws of music: tonality. When the first
musicians to rediscover Baroque music considered performing the musical scores
of their forebears, they turned to the tools – in the strictest sense of the term – of
their time. As well as relying on their familiar instruments, their libraries, their
notions of performance, and on the habits of interpretation which their training
ingrained in their fingers and ears, they also based themselves in a more general
and diffuse sense on what we might call the sensibility, the tastes and the demands
created by the music of their own period: ‘The Schola Cantorum, the Éditions
Breitkopf, and a few other institutions were responsible for the dissemination
across the world of a large number of early music scores written in the style of
Franck or Wagner’ [Souris 1976, p. 51]. These pieces of music were performed and
we got used to them: some of them became well known once again, even if others
still lie forgotten. During this process of rediscovery, solutions were found to what
were thought to be isolated problems arising from the difficulty of deciphering
early scores. A few modern equivalents were found for major ornaments, and it
was belatedly agreed to overdot20 a few characteristic rhythms, such as French

overtures. Otherwise, the music of this period was generously granted a certain
latitude, allowing performers the right to improvise its ornaments, since these
were unclear, and to follow their personal judgement when they performed it.
Essentially, this allowed modern interpreters to be flexible and selective, as they
adapted the codes and rules of early musical scores to their own notions of taste.
The notion of habit was important in this process: since early musical practices
had disappeared, new habits underpinned the way this repertoire was played,
allowing musicians to establish a new relationship with this music. This new
familiarity made it possible for them to overcome the distance of time and to
incorporate works composed over the space of two or three centuries into the vast
continuum of what had become ‘Classical music’, even if this meant overlooking
a few, secondary, stylistic nuances. Music composed before the time when it
became possible to transmit sound through the ages requires the mediation of
contemporary spokespersons: interpreters ensure this mediation. Their attempts to
facilitate its assimilation have been so successful that everyone finds (found? …)
it natural to speak of Bach’s concertos for piano, even though he composed his
works half a century before the piano was invented. This level of indifference to
the format and medium used by a creative artist would be difficult to imagine in
the case of painting: but then it is the preservation of the physical object produced
by the painter which makes a painting into a unique original and relegates its
subsequent reproductions to the rank of worthless copies. Unlike paintings, which
can survive unchanged across the shifting ages, defeating any potential attempts
to upstage them with imitations, music relies entirely on the transmission of a
coded transcription.
Following on from a long movement which started at the tail end of
Romanticism and sought a return to the sources, the 1970s saw the birth of a trend
which reclaimed the repertoire of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French,
20
Thus, when the combination of a dotted quaver and a semiquaver formed the
basis of a rhythmical pattern, the dotted quaver was lengthened and the semiquaver was
shortened. Relatively fixed and easy to isolate, this procedure was one of the first to be
integrated in the period performance of early music. Later on, it attracted criticism for the
same reasons: F. Neumann, for example, described it as ‘essentially, a legend’ (quoted in
J.R. Anthony (1997, p. 442)). Anthony himself gives a highly prejudiced account of these
debates in his epilogue ‘Thoughts on the performance of French Baroque music’ (ibid.,
pp. 438–44): both ‘amused’ and ‘annoyed’, he condescendingly dismisses these quarrels in
the name of what he calls common sense, although these old texts can hardly be considered
as evidence: ‘Through total immersion in the score and through detailed analysis of the
music qua music, guided by one’s musical sensibilities and aided by some knowledge of the
performance practices of the period, one may grasp the transcendent worth of a grand motet
by Delalande or a simple noel setting by Charpentier’ (p. 431). But then, in the first edition
of his book, this musicologist, who is a specialist of French music, argues that ‘we must not
claim for this music the depth of feeling that characterises the best German Baroque music
(…) …) nor the almost visceral passion of the best Italian Baroque music’ (1973, p. 1).
Italian and German music. The names of this trend’s most influential founding
figures were Alfred Deller, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, John
Gardiner, Frans Brüggen, William Christie and the Kuijken brothers, followed
by Jordi Savall, Philippe Herreweghe and Scott Ross. In France, Jean-Claude
Malgoire’s attempts to reclaim this musical tradition were succeeded by Henri
Ledroit’s and Christophe Coin’s, followed by a third generation of interpreters.
Born at a time when Baroque music was already being reclaimed, this third
generation escaped the controversies that had surrounded the foundation of the
movement, and naturally adopted this already established style.
The proponents of the trend for historically informed performances of early
music started by declaring their opposition to the Classical interpreters’ distortion
of this music, which was dubbed ‘Baroque’ for the sake of argument. In turn, this
provoked those who favoured its traditional interpretation to express their outrage
at new interpretations which they judged to be out of tune and soulless, performed
by tuneless singers and by instrumentalists whose affectation and technical
imprecision were those of musicologists rather than musicians. Nevertheless, it
was not very long before the new Baroque trend gained the upper hand. It soon
became very fashionable, and asserted its prominence in the disc catalogues of
recording companies during this period, before leaving the confines of its original
hunting ground to take on Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven (before others …).
Threatening the few conductors who still persist in performing Bach’s music as
though it were Schumann’s, the ‘neo-Baroques’ have now transformed the ‘ex-
Moderns’ into dinosaurs threatened with extinction. One finds examples of the
forced and unresolved coexistence of their two different styles of interpretation
still remaining only in a few instrumental repertoires which have a very strong
tradition. This is the case with the piano, for example. Pianists were in no hurry
to bury ‘their’ greatest composers simply because a few ‘Baroqueux’ threatened
to rattle the nail bomb of their harpsichords. Thus, Damian exaggerates when he
suggests that Brendel is the only one who continues to play Bach on his Steinway
concert piano. Nevertheless, even the piano constitutes an ambiguous counter-
example: the way in which pianists perform the repertoire of Baroque music
has completely changed since the trend for its reinterpretation swept over the
musical world.
On the Equality of Crotchets
Two very different interpretations of the same music thus coexisted for some
20-odd years following the twentieth-century rediscovery of Baroque music. In the
particular case of rhythm, its notation raised technical issues which can help us to
understand what was at stake. At the end of the Middle Ages, musical manuscripts
were learned, exhaustive and perfectly explicit, at least from a rhythmic point of
view. Problems of interpretation arise only in the case of unwritten music, the
traces of which can only be discovered through indirect clues. The most common
musical rhythm is the triple metre, which comes down to saying that one beat
equals three fractions of a beat, in modern terms. However, such a definition
would be completely anachronistic for early music, which privileged the different
rhythms of scansion and prosody. It would in fact be better to describe the
rhythm of early music as an unequal duple metre, rather than a triple metre, since
musicians in fact tend to consider that the ‘triple’ metre is the basic unit for the
longa-breve alternation, and develop their rhythmic canvasses by combining this
basic rhythmic unit into longer regulated sequences.
Over the course of the sixteenth century, this state of affairs evolved considerably,
in relation with the popularisation of printing. ‘This revolution was originally
typographical, but it goes without saying that this did not affect the performance
of music’ (Geoffroy-Dechaume 1964a, p. 13). Although the music remained
irregular, with ornaments and accents, its notation, however, was becoming
more homogeneous. In particular, the notation of its obvious characteristics was
simplified. The two half beats, long and short, were both written down as quavers
(if the crotchet was the beat). There was no need to transcribe something that was
obvious to all: the longa-breve alternation underpinning the rhythm of the music.21
It was not helpful to have page after page of complex, and sometimes incorrect,
notations: the dotted quaver-semiquaver notation, for example, imposes a strict
and constantly unequal rhythm which is at odds with the desired effect – as Saint-
Lambert explained (1702), there are pieces of music where the notes ‘want’ to be
less unequal than they are in others … As a result, the melody alone was transcribed,
saving space and money. All other symbols were discarded on the grounds that it
was superfluous to print them, since they depended on ‘good taste’. This, however,
had nothing to do with allowing performers to give free rein to their anachronistic
subjectivity. Instead, ‘good taste’ hinged on the rules governing early music and
the use of its instruments: having musical scores did not mean that these rules did
not have to be learned. On the contrary, a large number of treatises were devoted to
these rules: giving a detailed account of rhythms, tempos, phrasing and ornaments,
these treatises in fact left specialists with very little doubt as to the ways in which
early music of different styles (or ‘tastes’),22 countries and periods was performed.
Contrary to a notion often voiced by once ‘Modern’ interpreters of Baroque music,
there was very little scope for disagreement on these specialised questions.
Once it becomes clear that the supposed complexity of the rules governing early
music was invoked in order to make it possible to interpret it in ways which bluntly
21
This is also striking in the case of Jazz (and, from E. Borrel to A. Geoffroy-
Dechaume, cf. infra, p. 186, n. 33, all modern works point to this issue) since the shared
practical knowledge of its interpreters has also allowed them to avoid writing down rhythmic
irregularities, since they transcribe unequal metres with even quavers. Nevertheless, there is
no trend to perform be-bop tunes ‘evenly’, making them look like Sunday-school hymns.
22
‘Not the taste of the performer, as some seem to believe, but of the piece in
question – today we would speak of character or style’, as Geoffroy-Dechaume explains
(1964b, p. 41).
contravened these very rules, it is worth emphasising – at the risk of being blunt –
that what was at stake was important differences in the way in which this music
was performed, rather than simply the points of detail that finicking archaeologists
might debate. Classical performance techniques imposed their slow tempos, equal
notes (two equal semi-quavers in a quaver, for instance – that is a duple metre, in
the modern sense of the term, instead of a triple one), rare and optional ornaments
(aside from trills, which as it happens were not used in eighteenth-century French
music),23 their even vibrato, and smooth and flowing performances onto Baroque
music. Classical musicians also played Baroque music with their instruments (which
they distributed according to their own tradition, giving this music an orchestral
sound), bows, reeds and clef systems, and also gave it their high pitch, their equal
temperament, and a Romantic conception of nuances and effects. They also decided
on its numbers of performers based on what they did in their musical ensembles
or choirs, and allocated its vocal solo parts to Wagnerian sopranos and baritones
used to singing Verdi. Retrospectively, it seems that the ‘Moderns’ methodically
contradicted everything the theoreticians of historically informed performances of
Baroque music would later advocate – this was not an intentional process, of course –
as if these now ‘ex-Moderns’ systematically opposed the future ‘neo-Baroques’,
in the quasi-structuralist sense of the term. Without wishing to ignore the debates
surrounding the musicological interpretation of early musical treatises24 – which
themselves make a fascinating object of study – it nevertheless is worth pointing out
that they evade the main issues in the interpretation of early music. Musical treatises
are in fact surprisingly consistent when we consider the unanimous conclusions that
they have always suggested in practical terms, instead of reading them in light of
meticulous scholarly historical reconstructions, which often seek out controversy for
controversy’s sake. Such is the coherence of these treatises that, in 1934, E. Borrel
was able to assert that ‘an examination of more than three hundred and fifty French
authors … representing twice that number of works yields perfectly consistent results
on every point’ (pp. v–vi). Even before Borrel, these treatises already had allowed
A. Dolmetsch to sketch out the principal rules governing the interpretation of early
French music. Far from condoning the modern notion that interpreters are free to
let themselves be guided by their imagination,25 early in the century Dolmetsch
23
‘The French tremblement always starts with a higher note, whereas the Italian trill
starts with the note itself’ (Borrel 1934, note 2, p. 66).
24
The most polished of these interpretations contrasted F. Neumann (1978) with his
predecessors, particularly T. Dart (1954) and R. Donington (1963), in a mildly paranoid
attempt to argue the opposite to what everyone else had before. Neumann’s paradoxical
ideas are worth taking seriously when he examines the case of Bach, whose intermediary
position between different European styles raises very specific problems. However, his
controversial argument is less convincing when he takes on the definition of the French
style.
25
Dolmetsch (1915). Significantly, the subtitle for this work was: Revealed by
Contemporary Evidence. Because they never cited the exhaustively researched works which
had preceded their own ‘discoveries’, figures such as Geoffroy-Dechaume or J.-C. Veilhan
had already reconstituted most of the rules of interpretation for early French music.
And this is all the more crucial as in the eighteenth century, French music explicitly
resisted the surreptitious trend towards the metrical standardisation of music which
Italian modernism was promoting.
Borrel thus asserts, perhaps excessively categorically, that ‘We can see when
we draw up synoptic tables that everyone was in agreement, in spite of superficial
differences’ (p. 56),26 and goes to list tables which are almost exactly concordant
from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century. ‘Not only does it appear
that French music had a very different physiognomy from Italian or German art,
but we can see that the vigorous traditions which gave it its particular shape did not
undergo marked changes between 1650 and 1800’ (pp. v–vi). Most importantly,
he picked apart most of the arguments which were invoked in the debates that
followed, and formulated very clearly all the solutions which would later be
adopted by the interpreters of Baroque music. He formulated these solutions at
the level of general aesthetics, establishing the relationship of early music with
the spoken word, as well as its expression of feeling, and the clash between
French and Italian tastes. However, the solutions he proposed also answered very
specific technical issues concerning the instruments of Baroque music, the smaller
number of performers it required,27 the dominance of bass parts over inner parts,
its ornaments and their necessary variations (including what could and could not
be written down),28 its figured bass, its pitch,29 its reprises, its unequal notes,30 its
tempos and pulses. The sources which he quotes from are identical to those cited
by future interpreters of early music.31 Indeed, not only did Borrel restore both the
spirit and the letter of eighteenth-century French interpretations of early music,
but he raised a very pertinent point about the contemporary resurgence of the
(1977) helped to reinforce the notion that they rediscovered ‘the secrets of early music’
(I am alluding to Geoffroy-Dechaume’s Les ‘secrets’ de la musique ancienne) even as they
referred to the same treatises (or indeed in most cases to the same extracts …) as Borrel.
26
He emphasises that ‘In spite of the fluctuations of fashion, musical practices
remained so similar that authors writing around 1790 listed the same methods as those of
the end of the 17th century’ (ibid., note 1).
27
Borrel gives detailed lists of their orchestras (pp. 40–43).
28
‘This is why it is very difficult to define in writing how to do it well’, David (1737,
quoted p. 76).
29
Borrel quotes (p. 142) the series of measurements which J. Sauveur took at the
Opera around 1700, where the ‘A’ is around 405 Hz (as opposed to 423 in 1810 and 435
‘today’, that is in 1934 – and 450 now, which was a B in 1700). He also quotes a comment
Quantz made around 1750, saying that he found ‘the French pitch very low’ (note 1, p. 143).
30
Borrel shows very well that this is not because the written texts were imprecise,
but because it was impossible to transcribe this unequal rhythm: ‘When notes must be
made unequal, the extent of their inequality is a question of taste: there are pieces where
it is appropriate to make them very unequal, and other where this is less the case. This is a
matter of taste, as with rhythm’ wrote Saint-Lambert in 1702 (quoted p. 152).
31
These texts have been reprinted several times and are now widely available.
problems posed by contradictions involved in wanting to fix it. Thus, Borrel writes
that ‘Whereas Italian music was subject to very precise metric pulses and tempos,
French music was marked by a great degree of rhythmic flexibility’ (p. 180) before
quoting Rameau32 and concluding on these perfectly explicit lines by Rousseau:
There are probably not four bars in any given air which have exactly the same
duration. If this objection [to the use of the metronome] is very convincing when
it comes to French music, it is not persuasive at all in the case of Italian music,
which is completely subject to very precise pulses and tempos; indeed nothing
better illustrates the perfect opposition between these two musics; for whereas
Italian music draws its energy from its subjection to rigorous pulses and tempos,
French music invests all its energies into keeping the same pulses and tempos
under its control, speeding up or slowing down their pace depending on the
demands of the style of a song, or on the suppleness of the singer’s vocal chords.33
In other words, the rebirth of Baroque music cannot be attributed to the scholarly
rediscovery of a body of knowledge which had escaped the attention of our
ignorant predecessors, as though the rediscovery of that knowledge would have
led to errors being rectified.34 On the contrary, the dissemination from the 1950s
of modern interpretations of Baroque music, thanks to LPs, coincided with the
popularisation of the content of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises and
tables of ornaments. This musicological aggiornamento explicitly contradicted the
majority of the choices made at the very same time by the ‘Modern’ interpreters
of Baroque music.
The Arguments of Taste
In short, we are facing a false debate – but this did not make it any less real.
Its very intensity is instructive because the controversies surrounding early
32
‘The main object of our music is feeling, which has no fixed rhythms, and can
therefore not be subjected everywhere to a regular tempo without losing some of the
truthfulness which makes its charm’ (quoted p. 181).
33
Borrel cites this quotation (which is from the article ‘Chronomètre’ published in
the Encyclopédie) on p. 182. This article raises questions about the transformation of our
historical and cultural perceptions of musical time (we shall return to this issue), showing
that Borrel had a clearer understanding of this problem than his successors, who only
emphasised the purely technical need to restore the different rules of interpretation which
needed to be applied to French music, as though these had simply been forgotten.
34
Although I have chosen to emphasise the work of Borrel, he was not an isolated
figure. Donington’s research, for example, resolved other debates which this quarrel later
delighted in feeding, when he asserted, as early as 1949, that the A was still around 415 Hz
at the time of Beethoven’s death, and that the phrase ‘well-tempered’ clavier that Bach used
does not in any way mean that it was equal (p. 189).
music cannot be reduced to an opposition between right and wrong. My point

is not to discredit the position of the ‘Modern’ interpreters of this music by
emphasising their systematically ‘erroneous’ choices, in order to vindicate the
proponents of historically informed performances of Baroque music, in the name
of musicological truth. Instead, I wish to investigate the web of practices which the
‘Moderns’ made theirs for almost a century, instead of sweeping these practices
under the carpet on the grounds that they were mistaken, which would be a most
unhelpful explanation. What makes an investigation of the arguments put forward
by both camps in this new version of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
important is the fact that they had their own ways of performing Baroque music,
and that this gave them pleasure. I seek neither to arbitrate between them, nor to
unmask them by putting them to the test of historical truth, but to restore the logic
underpinning their respective stances, in order to understand how they arrived at
their constructions of Baroque music, and what underlies them – what criteria of
validation do they invoke in order to define music?
For the ‘Moderns’,35 the ultimate argument that can be invoked in discussions
of music is pleasure, combined with the progress of this art itself, or at the very
least of its media and instruments. The arguments they invoke are:
• ‘The main thing for me is to enjoy it. What do I care about treatises, if I
prefer to listen to Kathleen Ferrier’s voice rather than a feeble falsetto’s? and
• ‘Our instruments are much better, more powerful and more tuneful. If
Bach could have known them, he would have played on them – in any
case, he was constantly transposing his own music. Why shouldn’t we take
advantage of progress, when he would have surely done the same?’
For the ‘Ancients’ (i.e. the proponents of historically informed performances of

early music), accuracy is what matters: or, to put it more grandly, historical and
musicological ‘authenticity’. For them, it is not a matter of taking issue with various
modes of interpretation, but simply of acknowledging errors. They advocate a
return to early musical treatises and want musicians to relearn techniques that have
been lost, in order to be able to perform Baroque music the way it was in its day –
or, as Souris puts it, in order ‘to better bring out the original signification of Bach’s
35
Mindful not to make an already complex situation even more complicated, I
continue to call ‘Modern’ those who favoured performing early music with contemporary
instruments. The label ‘Modern’ nevertheless obviously raises significant issues: which
was more forward-looking, and which was more traditionalist in spirit, the nineteenth
century’s version of Baroque music, or the current return to the phrasing of early music?
The difference between these approaches does not lie in their attachment to the past, but in
the channels which they use to communicate with the past: from this point of view, it is the
‘Moderns’ who are traditionalists, since they are faithful to inherited practices, while the
historically informed ‘Baroqueux’ are the Protestants of our age, in the sense that for them
truth lies with the sources. We shall return to this point.
music’ (1976, p. 201). This goes without saying for the ‘Baroques’, and it is only in
reaction to the controversy surrounding their performance of early music that they
felt compelled to develop their argument further, for example by advocating the
use of early instruments. Their position has something of an ‘all or nothing’ quality,
since everything is interconnected in this case. They believe that the advice which
early musical treatises proffer on phrasing, ornaments, rhythms and the balance of
sound which bring us closer to the truth of early music, only have any significance
because they take into account the sounds, techniques, volume and number of
instruments for which this music was devised. Beyond its polemical worth, this
‘all or nothing’ stance expresses something which was probably decisive for the
outcome of the debate. Although it made for a relatively weak argument in the
first instance, for music lovers who are used to, and enjoy, music with sounds and
a style different from those which the proponents of musicological authenticity
wanted to impose on them, this stance, nevertheless, may help us understand why
the new interpretation of Baroque music eventually gained the upper hand after
a period of time: its advocates won the argument because they had the advantage
of coherence, since each point they marked here or there was a gain for the entire
trend for the reinterpretation of this music. Every time one of its various basic
characteristics was accepted, this simultaneously legitimised its other features.
Once audiences adopted the harpsichord, they soon embraced ornamentation, as
well as the unequal rhythms which combine so well with embellishments, before
embracing the other parts of this music towards which these features steered
them. In turn, this led them to prefer early instruments which do not drown out
the harpsichord and are able to play in the same style, such as the viola da gamba,
which itself calls to be married with the voice of a counter-tenor, and soon enough,
it becomes clear that smaller numbers of performers are required if all these lovely
sounds are to be heard ….
Taken together, all these different, interconnected, aspects of the interpretation
of Baroque music constituted an articulated system, as when this music was
originally composed. This made it increasingly difficult to opt for one of these
elements over another depending on one’s ‘taste’, not so much because this would
strip the music of its musicological authenticity as because this would have a
knock-on effect and discredit the music as a whole. Thus, the few concrete objects
that the Baroques brought forward in support of their position, and which initially
were reluctantly adopted only because it was difficult to challenge their value as
evidence for issues such as its unequal temperament, lower pitch and reduced
number of performers. This finally had an impact on their entire argument, and
validated the other elements of this music which sceptics could dismiss more easily
in the absence of historical proof. These concrete objects comprised treatises and
other writings, such as manuscripts. Thus, in one manuscript, Bach wrote down the
ornaments to a Canzona, for pedagogical reasons: the page is covered with them –
it could not be further from the minimalist abstraction which is often attributed to
him by those who claim themselves faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of his
inspired music. Among these written documents were also registers in which the
numbers of performers were inscribed, as well as the voices which sung in this or
that church, at Court, or for this or that aristocrat. As well as written sources, these
concrete objects also included early instruments, which were enthusiastically
restored in the nineteenth century, altering their soundposts, bores and the material
their strings were made of,36 until organologists became more aware of the precious
insights into the past which these early instruments afforded them, and started to
reconstitute and copy them in an effort to reconcile their conservation with the
constraints which they imposed on musical performance. Forgotten instruments
were also rediscovered. This was the case with the viola da gamba, for example:
after an initial generation of laborious and militant performances, this instrument
came to acquire indubitable virtuosos despite the fact that it makes the continuous
legato phrasing of Classical music technically impossible. Once they familiarised
themselves with its techniques, musicians were able to prove, bow in hand, that
this impossibility was not a weakness, but made the viola the ideal instrument with
which to imitate the accents of the voice and the expression of feeling, which are
both so sought after in early French music.
The various components of historically informed interpretations of Baroque
music are thus part of a continuum. The external elements on which the historical
reconstitution of this music is based can be used to caution its internal elements.
Because they are founded on musical convictions and cannot be proved directly,
such internal elements could not aspire to the direct and ‘immediate’ recognition of
music lovers simply based on the seductive beauty of a performance.37 Before this
could be achieved, they had to wait until a whole milieu had taken shape, grown
accustomed to a certain way of playing music, and shed the dogmatic certainties
and inflexible stance of pioneers still driven by their opposition to the approach
of Classical musicians. Conversely, it was only the musical achievements of the
Baroques which made people listen to, and take on board, the musicological
arguments underpinning their performances: without the music, these arguments
were all too easily dismissed as the tedious and humourless speculations of scholars.
The ‘Moderns’ Surrounded and Defeated
In other words, it was a long and heterogeneous series of interconnected mediations

which led to the irreversible success of the Baroques: taken in isolation, none of
36
‘Modern instruments have travestied the early ones in their own image’, Souris (op.
cit., p. 52). Cf. also ‘Le cabinet d’instruments du Conservatoire de Musique et le débat sur
le muséum des Arts et des Sciences’, F. Gétreau (1992).
37
This crucial stage in the recognition of Baroque music was first achieved with
the success which J.-M. Villégier’s and W. Christie’s 1987 revival of Lully’s ‘tragédie
lyrique’ Atys met with among a broad circle of music lovers, before being confirmed by
the unexpected popularity of A. Corneau’s fictional account of Marin Marais’ initiation to
music by the Sieur de la Colombe, in the 1990 film Tous les matins du monde.
these mediations would have had enough weight to achieve this success and face
down the arguments of their opponents, whoever they might be. Conversely, this
forced the ‘Moderns’ to beat a steady retreat until they were surrounded – there is
no better image for what happened.
The ‘personal’ tastes of audiences, which disc buyers and concert goers exhibit
from the comfort of their seats when they assert their right to decide on what
music they like, relies on a solid tradition of outstanding interpreters; on the echo
which radio programmes such as ‘Tribune des critiques de disque’,38 in France,
provide for their own hypersensitive feelings; and the relay of support offered by
the institutional structures of musical education, the Opera, and the great concert
halls, with their programme choices. However, asserting this right gradually
started to look like a display of foolishly stubborn ignorance as the musical stance
of the ‘Moderns’ became less fashionable; as discs and the radio began to welcome
a new repertoire which allowed them to diversify their audiences; as critics started
to acknowledge the talent and musicality of the descendants of musicians they
had once dispatched with biting irony; and as music schools began to teach early
music, the harpsichord and the basso continuo, and as some musical summer
schools started to focus exclusively on Baroque music.
This transformation of musical tastes is fascinating. As the objects on which
the personal convictions of the audience relied were retracted one after the other,
they seemed to gradually turn into signs of bad faith, in the literal sense of the
phrase: these beliefs were entirely self-validating. Nothing could better reveal, ab
absurdo, the patient work of collective construction which underpins notions of
taste and is disguised by alleged reference to personal opinion. In turn, there is a lot
we can learn from this real-time experiment on taste by focusing on the systematic
clash between the musical sensibilities of the ‘Baroques’ and the ‘Moderns’.39
For one thing, this focus enables us to remove the tastes of both trends from the
sphere of individual subjectivity, which ordinarily allows our tastes to escape any
attempt to account for them. At the same time, however, closely following the
development of complex musical, technical, aesthetic, indeed quasi-existential,
arguments also prevents us from overcoming individualism only to go to the other
extreme and fall into the trap of sociologistic perspectives. Displacing dubious
arguments on the autonomy of subjective tastes with a deterministic take on social
differentiation would be just as unscrupulous, in terms of the modalities through
38
Broadcast on France Musique during that period, each episode of Armand
Panigel’s celebrated music programme focused on a comparison between several musical
interpretations of a same work and the heated debates which it provoked among a panel
of music critics. After this programme went off air, it continued to serve as a model for an
uninterrupted series of analogous – but often more pedantic, world-weary and cautious –
radio shows.
39
Here I follow the lead of Science and Technology Studies, which gave a central role
to these controversies in order to integrate objects back into sociological analysis, see e.g.
Callon and Latour (eds) (1982) and Shapin and Schaffer (1985).
which subjects of taste and the objects they elect mutually constitute each other.
Whereas sociologistic perspectives empty the musical world of its mediators,
transforming it into a transparent screen onto which the shadows of our conflicting
social identities are projected, the quarrel which opposed the ‘Baroques’ to the
‘Moderns’ on the contrary allows us to see each one of the links in the chain of
validations on which musical tastes rely, disclosing them one by one. Like the
characters of a play, these validators jostle each other, showing us what other
validations they entail, which ones resist change and which ones yield as we
modify our conceptions of music.
This turns the question of the truth of Baroque music on its head. I do not
seek to compound the quasi-military defeat of those I have called the ‘Moderns’
by showing that they were indeed wrong and that from early on, the musical
Stalinism of some historical trend sealed their fate without them even realising
what was happening to them, and by arguing that they had already become living
fossils when they discovered that their intellectual position had been invalidated.
What I seek to do here, on the contrary, is to take advantage of their resistance to
historically informed performances of early music in order to understand what it
is that binds us to a particular music, sometimes even to the point of blinding us
to factual evidence. Nineteenth-century musicians – and, a fortiori, the performers
who record discs today – already had access to the early musical treatises, as well
as to harpsichords, lutes and flutes. Yet, they ignored them, and decided to perform
what they wanted to listen to, however incongruously, rather than what the written
sources told them to play.40
Active Acts of Resistance
Far from it being laziness or negligence that stood in the way of a careful
examination of the source texts of early music, any tentative indication that there
was a possibility that this music should be approached differently was actively
and systematically rebuffed whenever it reared its head. The active character of
this resistance is clear in the commentaries added to modern editions of partitas
for the Harpsichord, which are overwhelmingly intended for pianists. Most ossias41
40
Here is a legendary example – perhaps in fact too good to be true – of the incoherence
of the ‘Moderns’: it concerns the original score of a French overture, which is explicitly
double-dotted in the first two bars, in order to indicate the ‘right’ rhythm, but is written
down in equal quavers for the rest of the movement, as was the custom: a contemporary
French ensemble is said to have scrupulously performed the piece as such, despite being
specialised in the music of the period ….
41
Literally ‘alternatives’: simpler variants written down in footnotes under supposedly
difficult passages.
suppress unequal notes wherever possible through a presentation42 which does away
with their original ornaments and transcribes their mordents and cadences into
notes of equal value, everywhere superimposing equal rhythms over the unequal
rhythms of the original works. However, the intentions motivating the editors’
revised editions of early musical scores are clearest in their verbal commentaries.
Take L. Oesterle’s edition of highlights in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Early Keyboard Music,43 with an introduction by R. Aldrich. Presenting its readers
with the usual ossias, in order to clarify – i.e. translate into honest double and triple
quavers – the few traces of early ornaments which have been allowed to remain
in the scores, the text also contains the following piece of advice, in a footnote to
Rameau’s Rappel des oiseaux,44 which is filled with mordents: ‘It will be found
more effective to omit all mordents.’ No justification is given for this piece of
advice, which stems from the peculiar logic of the editor’s stance. Although this
edition claims to ‘add’ the scores’ ornaments, this is only because the Classical
musical tradition had taken them out in the first place, either suppressing them, or
turning them into notes whenever they were written down. This is what I wanted
to underline: whether they are suppressed and changed into written notes without
comment, or kept but noted as superfluous, ornaments were no longer performed.
They were not tolerated as such: the Classical taste had expelled them. Throughout
the book, moreover, footnotes expedite the matter, specifying that the ornaments
‘May be omitted’. When one thinks about it, these footnotes are both paradoxical
and extremely revealing: although a new trend for historical rigour compelled
the editor to publish the original symbols inscribed on the scores, he hastens to
contradict them through the notes which he superimposes onto the scores. This
amusing example has the merit of illuminating the tension between the editor’s
desire to respect the integrity of the musical scores presented and the interpreters’
performance ‘programme’: this tension is hidden both when the text of the
published scores has been revised directly, and when the editors have been careful
not to alter the Urtext in any way, as is now the general practice.45
More reasonable explanations, based on authenticity alone, shed light neither
on the long and fierce resistance to the Baroques shown by the ‘Moderns’, with their
vindictive diatribes, nor on the long period that came before, when the ‘Moderns’
patiently constructed their canons of interpretation for that music. It is fascinating
to see how far ‘Modern’ interpreters rebuilt a new tradition from an older heritage
which they simultaneously rejected. In most cases they just ignored the symbols
which they sometimes came across on musical scores. Retrospectively, it now
42
One would be hard pressed to find a better example of the temporal dimension of
the meaning of the word: ‘to present’ something is to make it ‘present.’
43
(Oesterle, ©1904, 1932, 1967). Printed by Schirmer, an American publisher, who
in fact tried to be faithful to source texts and avoid making excessive corrections to original
manuscripts, as opposed to French publishers, who systematically revised them.
44
On page 165 of volume 2.
45
Cf. Heugel’s ‘Le Pupitre’ series, or Henle’s and Bärenreiter’s editions of Bach.
looks as though they acted in bad faith. Yet, in order to understand why this was, it
is more helpful to emphasise their faith than the fact that it was bad …. How, then,
are we to understand why the ‘Moderns’ misapprehended Baroque music? Why
did they systematically corrupt its early scores by revising them when they had
access to early musical treatises? Why did they deliberately omit the ornaments
of Baroque music when they knew there were tables of ornamentation? And why
was their resistance to historically informed perspectives on this music so fierce?
What was it that was so precious to them that a new version of the quarrel of the
‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’ had to erupt, with a conflict waged on the military
model of a war of attrition, where they were forced to beat a continuous retreat as
they lost one battle after another?
The tone in which the ‘Moderns’ voiced their arguments against the Baroques
followed a characteristic path: initially speaking with the quietly objective
assurance of those who are certain that reason is on their side, they gradually
started to adopt the aggressive assertiveness of those who defend an arbitrarily
subjective position:
• Initial position: they argued that the ‘Baroqueux’ had it all wrong, that
their musicological claims were erroneous, or at least highly controversial,
and that new findings would soon belie their latest assertions: this was the
line that Boulez took, making his point in a tone that seemed rather old-
fashioned even at the time of writing.46
• Later, once the early texts were too well known to be simply ignored, the
‘Moderns’ retreated behind the claim that, although their performances may
not be true to the letter of the early treatises, they were true to their spirit.47
They simply disregarded these texts, skilfully taking advantage of the fact
46
‘With music, authenticity is even more of an utopian ideal because it involves a
kind of conjectural restoration which changes according to the tastes of the times and the
latest encyclopedic discoveries …’ in Early Music, Issue 3 (1990, p. 355). Comparing this
position (which is seldom argued anymore) with the clarity of the early texts makes it seem
clear that it is in ‘bad faith’. Let us quote what Quantz wrote on unequal notes in 1752, for
example: ‘You must know how to make a distinction in execution between the principal
notes, ordinarily called accented or in the Italian manner, good notes, and those that pass,
which some foreigners call bad notes … In consequence of this rule, the quickest notes in
every piece of moderate tempo, or even in the Adagio, though they seem to have the same
value, must be played a little unequally, so that the stressed notes of each figure, namely the
first, third, fifth and seventh, are held slightly longer than the passing, namely the second,
fourth, sixth, and eighth, although this lengthening must not be as much as if the notes were
dotted’ (1985, p. 123, this last emphasis is mine). ‘What we write is different from what we
perform’, as Couperin explained (1716).
47
‘We grip them in a genetic paralysis which distorts the underlying meaning of their
work and activity’ (ibid., p. 356) wrote Boulez, drawing on Adorno’s view that ‘The sole
concern of today’s Bach devotees is to see that no inauthentic dynamics, modifications of
tempo, oversize choirs and orchestras creep in’ (1967, pp. 142–3).
that Baroque music leaves a degree of freedom to its interpreters. I have

already discussed the anachronistic stance underpinning this interpretation
of the rules of taste: the early treatises enunciated these rules very clearly,
in order to define musical styles, not in order to circumvent them.
• In the United Kingdom, in particular, a certain number of interpreters
(N. Marriner and R. Leppard), who in many cases had become interested
in early music before everyone else, tried to build bridges between the
two camps. They would concede a few isolated points to the Baroques,
endorsing their demands for smaller numbers of performers or agreeing to
double-dot dotted quavers, for example, in order to limit the scope of the
reinterpretation of Baroque music.
• Finally, the case that the late and much-lamented Antoine Goléa,48 for
example, made so powerfully for the importance of the audience’s personal
pleasure displaced the musicological debate: claiming the right to pleasure,
he heretically challenged the naive inquisitors of the new musical orthodoxy,
portraying them as tone-deaf scribes who spent their time poring over
manuscripts and tried to use the authority of the early treatises to impose
a single way of enjoying music. Powerful though it was, this argument
nevertheless also implicitly acknowledged that the ‘Moderns’ had lost
the debate, at least on the question of who was faithful to the early texts.
Thus, the quasi-legalistic, or indeed humanitarian, invocation of the right
of people to decide for themselves on what gives them pleasure, went from
being a majority position with conservative connotations, to a marginal
stance taking on libertarian overtones. Although those who advocated this
stance first tried to pit music against musicology,49 they could no longer
invoke a standard other than their own taste in order to validate their
judgement in personally liking or disliking a performance.50
48
Goléa was an opinionated musician and music critic who tended to be passionately
excessive and have intransigent tastes when he spoke on the French radio programme ‘La
Tribune des critiques’, where he acted as a foil for the programme’s producer, Panigel,
whose views epitomised a position of moderate and open-minded erudition.
49
‘C’est faux’ Goléa would expostulate in ‘La Tribune des critiques’ whenever an
extract of a historically informed performance had finished playing, playing on words to
imply that it sounded wrong because it was off key.
50
Time goes on, however, and it would be tempting to wager that, once they have
become historical and thoroughly denaturalised themselves, modern interpretations of
early music (well, perhaps not all of their interpretations, nor just any of them) will once
again have their passionate supporters … Thus, Opus 111, a specialised music label, has
already produced a record of C. Sperring performing Mendelssohn’s 1841 re-orchestration
of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which also happens to be a historical version of this piece:
interestingly, Mendelssohn’s work coincided exactly with the beginning of the Romantic
versions of Bach which the Baroques would later oppose.
Social Time, Musical Time
What does this mean? Let us continue to focus on the particular case of the
rhythm of Baroque music, which some musicians perform as unequal, while
others play it as equal and identical with its notation. The terms of the technical
debate are clear, but they keep the real problem hidden from us. As we have
seen, the stance of the ‘Moderns’ was not the product of the faithful perpetuation
of a misreading dating back to the nineteenth century: it was not the case that
nineteenth-century musicians naively mistook the symbols of early music for their
modern equivalents, losing sight of the unwritten unequal rhythm of this music.
The opposite was true. The ‘Moderns’ did not get the wrong end of the stick, and
take unequal notes for equal notes because they did not understand what they were
reading, making an error which they would gladly have corrected if only they had
known. We know that this is not the case because we only have to look at another
area of the interpretation of early music to observe their distaste for ornaments, as
well as for other supposedly affected and useless additions which they believed
marred the beautiful abstract purity of Bach’s counterpoints. The problem was
not that the ‘Moderns’ could not perform these additions, but that they didn’t
want to: their entire musical selves – down to their very bodies – resisted them.
The oversimplified notation of music, which ‘musicologists’ fight against51 and
attribute to Classical musicians’ misinterpretation of the early texts, is itself the
product of another oversimplification: the oversimplification of the very rhythms
of early music, which were the object of an even more far-reaching transformation,
breaking away with their original relationships, which were free of strict metres
and impossible to transcribe. Even more than musical notation, what changed was
our relationship to time – a relationship which music extracted from deep within
us, externalised and projected onto objects, works, the regularly spaced bars of
musical scores, and, later, onto the regulated beats of metronomes.52
The fact that each period has its own musical temporality, and that the musical
body incorporates this temporality, exemplifies the intermediary configurations
which hold the musical world together. Here is my interpretation of the debates
that Baroque music provoked: nineteenth- and twentieth-century revisions of this
music were not the consequence of misunderstandings. On the contrary, taking
advantage of the parallel evolution of music and musical notation, musicians used
these misreadings to adapt an early repertoire to their modern musical temporality.
This modern musical temporality differed from that of the seventeenth and
51
‘The fact that musical notation is almost identical across different periods lulls
us into a misguided sense of complacency: it can lead us to make errors with serious
consequences for nuance, the musical tempo we choose, and our “emotional treatment” of
various styles’, wrote Harnoncourt (1985, p. 44).
52
Cf. supra, p. 186, for Rousseau’s argument against the chronometer: what could
better illustrate the way in which mechanical time was separated from the relationship that
living bodies have to time?
eighteenth centuries, and could no longer tolerate unequal notes. It is easy to

assert that musical temporalities can be dated in time, and correspond to a sort
of objectivated common ground (which A. Schaeffner rather fetchingly calls
‘the society of musicians’)53 from which a given period draws its basic rhythmic
elements. Indeed, it would be difficult to contradict such a hypothesis if it was
merely asserted in passing: conversely, however, such an assertion would not
take matters much further. In contrast, the case of Baroque music has the merit of
providing us with tangible evidence of the aptness of this hypothesis. The fierce
resistance which ‘Modern’ interpreters offered to a beat that was different from
their own allows us to evaluate the power of the sense of the structuring of time
which we unknowingly carry within us, and which, unlike musical notation, is not
visible to the eye. Only the violence with which the ‘Moderns’ reacted, first of all
to symbols which were incompatible with their own sense of this structuring, and
secondly to interpreters who advantageously expressed this alternative structuring
of time, can give us a sense of the significance of the basic rhythmic framework
which we project outside us only to seek it again in music, as if music were external
and only to be enjoyed from the outside.
The interpretation of Baroque music did not cause a controversy because of the
avatars of musical notation, but because it confronted musicians – and, through
them, their audiences as a whole54 – to a different, less fixed, experience of time
than the one which they had incorporated. Understanding the history of music is not
just a matter of understanding the increasing polyphonic, harmonic and rhythmic
complexity of music. It is also a matter of understanding a continuous process of
simplification: music has steadily gone from a socially overloaded temporal order,
through the medium of the body (steps, dances, ceremonies, vocal accents), to
a disincarnated, abstract, ‘measured’, and simpler temporal order: four crotchets
in a bar.55 As it constructed this neutral space, music gradually appropriated the
53
Schaeffner (1980, p. 39) writing on the collective memories underpinning their
interpretations.
54
This invites a couple of much more general anthropological points: we must
emphasise the need to project our means of expression onto more tangible objects, in order
to put them at a distance from ourselves, as well as the need to rely on these tangible objects,
in order to reintroduce the variety of our forms of expressivity. Doing this leads us to be
critical of great oppositions (as are J. Goody (1977) on the opposition between the written
and the oral, and E. Eisenstein (1979), in his rereading of the development of printing) and
focus instead on close examinations of a large range of interconnected processes: rhetoric,
spelling, prosody, and grammar, are to thought and language what music theory is to music.
55
Early twentieth-century reformers of musical pedagogy argued against this evolution
of musical temporality: countering the rigidity of traditional music theory, they developed
a theory of the difference between rhythm and metre which associated rhythm with words
evoking the body, feeling and living, and metre with the cold, lifeless instrumentality of
written signs; cf. La Musique et l’accusation (Hennion and Schnapper 1986). For a detailed
account of this argument, see also ‘Les discours de la méthode: leçon sur le signe et le son’
(Hennion 1988, pp. 143–69).
function of asserting the social temporal order, depriving it of the direct benefit of
the wealth of immediate relationships which it enjoyed, only to give it ever more
expressive possibilities. The fact that very diverse social groups56 (including the
greatest minds of the century, starting with d’Alembert, Diderot and Rousseau)57
paid close attention to the rationalisation of music in the eighteenth century makes
it clear that the stakes were high, since this was also the period when the social
contract and the newly mechanical universe were being rationalised – in France,
Rameau was nicknamed the ‘Newton of music’. After Rameau achieved this
rationalisation,58 this question started to attract less interest, and for two centuries
musicians were left to theorise about it on their own, undisturbed.
Beyond musical notation, which is the most obvious of the operations through
which music is projected onto matter, the evolution of musical rhythm lets us
glimpse another similar process of objectification in the continuous attempts music
makes to remove its temporality from the sphere of lived experience and project
it onto an external material object, only to re-appropriate it and play with it again,
endowing it with new human value. The Baroques’ rediscovery of early music must
be understood in the context of the slow development of the history of rhythm,
which deviated from the socio-musical temporality of the previous era in very
gradual stages, swinging back and forth between a ‘warm’, expressive, social form
of temporality (dance, speech, collective chanting, hymns, etc.) and a neutralised,
measurable, form of temporality which was set free from the weight of signification
and transformed into ‘cold’, formal, units of fixed duration (a crotchet equals two
quavers). The literal process of expression through which our various experiences of
duration were projected onto external material objects, allowed musical temporality
to extract itself slowly from the order of lived experience, before it could return to
it, armed with a new material framework. The history of music is interspersed with
a series of false debates which repeat the same arguments, between musicians who
side with the senses and musicians who side with reason, those who seek to meet
the demand for music and those who seek to increase the autonomy of music –
i.e. between ‘expressionists’ and ‘formalists’.59 No sooner does this ‘cold’ musical
temporality become accepted and shared by all, than it starts to warm up. As the
material structure which had made the birth of mechanical forms of temporality
possible slips out of focus once it is shared, so social forms of temporality take over
again, inflecting these mechanical forms of temporality anew with their accents and
56
‘America is no longer on our minds; melody, harmony, this is what everyone is
writing about’ wrote Mme Riccoboni in 1777, quoted by G. Snyders (1968, p. 142).
57
In her chapter on writers and music, in the wonderful La Musique des Lumières
(1985, pp. 331–92), B. Didier argues that music both challenged, and was the catalyst for,
a new dynamic equilibrium, which created a paradoxical new literary predicament, because
writers were unable to put it into words.
58
I refer readers to my study of the operation of rationalisation accomplished by
Rameau’s theoretical work (Hennion 1987).
59
Cf. L.B. Meyer’s critique of these complementary positions (1956, pp. 3–5).
distortions, in order to give continuous, ‘spontaneous’, and sensual, expression to

the movements of our individual and collective bodies. This process underpins the
rediscovery of early music. In my opinion, this ‘revival’ is aptly termed: it is best
understood as having achieved a recognisable success with the revitalisation of a
previously ossified frame of music, in this case the ultimately rigid regulation of
Classical music. And if the Baroques prefer to see themselves as having achieved a
revolutionary break with tradition and may well, to some degree, have rewritten the
past for that purpose, they are certainly not the first to be guilty of this.
The fact that music has always alternated between withdrawing from the social
temporal order and re-embodying it, makes it possible to consider the history of
rhythm as a model for our attempts to stabilise our relationships through the harder,
more external, and more material forms onto which we project them. The emphasis
on ‘equal’ rhythms is particularly evocative – as the word itself implies, with its
connotations of mechanical regularity – of this attempt to extrapolate rhythmic
formations from our bodies, detaching them from relationships where they are
immediately meaningful. The seventeenth century used bar-lines and divided time
into regular intervals within them. Forgetting that bar-lines themselves had imposed
a more rigid structure than that of earlier musics, seventeenth-century musicians
played with the unequal accentuation and duration of stressed and unstressed beats
inside this fixed frame. Thus, alternating between a longa and a breve, between
holding a note and letting it go, and between different accents and weak beats,
Baroque musicians mark the movements of dance and speech. Oblivious to the
fact that their division of time into regular bars, and into unequal rhythms within
them, was a very specific historical phenomenon, they could see it as no more
than a handy way to transcribe a fundamental movement which music merely
expressed. For their part, the Romantics abhorred the unequal beats within the
bars of early music, and found their accumulated effects nauseatingly heavy and
affected. But what did they do? As soon as they acquired equal beats in addition
to equal bars, they riddled their performances with rubatos, accelerandos and
ritenutos, which were foreign to Baroque music. Now that free musical expression
was no longer possible within the stabilised frame of the bar, with its standardised
beats, it was these fluctuating tempos that provided musicians with a new space for
expressivity. Of course, a century later, formal purists hostile to facile effects came
to consider that these rubatos epitomised Romantic bad taste, and they hastened to
get rid of them in their own interpretations. In turn, frustrated by the cold and stiff
performances of this formalist trend, music lovers embraced the new expressive
sensations which the unequal performances of the ‘Baroqueux’ gave them (while
oblivious to the fact that they owed it to a new and unprecedented format for the
projection of music onto a material object, more fixed than any previous musical
object: the compact disc).
Were the ‘Ancients’ More Innovative than the ‘Moderns’?
I have focused on the debates surrounding the revival of Baroque music in the
twentieth century as a kind of experimentation, allowing us to examine what
they reveal about the place of objects in musical practices. Ordinarily, these are
perceived as though they are inextricably bound up together, because one of the
roles of objects is to naturalise music itself by projecting it onto the materiality
of collective usages. This form of materiality has become invisible to us as such,
because we simply look for the properties attached to the specific objects which
lie in front of our eyes: ‘A quasi-magical aura emanates from musical notation,
as from any form of writing, and radiates onto the reader and the interpreter.’60
However, as the treatises of Baroque music were forgotten, a gap opened between
objects – which still existed, and were intact but were no longer connected with
musical performance – and musical practices, which had been reconstituted
without taking these objects into account, by focusing on a different musical
tradition, which was performed with other objects. Until the Baroques bridged
the gap separating us from these objects, the relationship to time which we had
incorporated into our bodies prevailed over these lost objects, which had reached
us separately from their music. Conversely, these objects only recovered their
power once the Baroques put them to use again, allowing them to attract the
attention of contemporary music lovers, and giving them supporters among those
who played forgotten instruments, as well as among critics, radio producers on the
lookout for something different, small record producers keen to foster new tastes,
and audiences who had already come across other trends dislocating Classical
musical tastes, such as contemporary music, in particular … Similarly, we have to
follow the same complex logic of interpretation ourselves, in order to decode the
social game played by the performers of early music today.
What did the Baroques do? They did not reproduce early music, they reproduced
it, bringing its media, objects, and tricks back within our earshot. Although
the production of objects is not sufficient to impose new tastes directly on its
own merit, the production of some of them is nevertheless indirectly capable of
deeply altering tastes, by introducing an asymmetry in the network of validations
on which music relies for credibility. The interpretation of early music by the
‘Moderns’ was only innovative in the sense that it abruptly repatriated the early
musical fragments which they found acceptable into their own musical universe.
The Baroques were much more innovative, since they on the contrary tried to
retune the ear of contemporary audiences to early musical sounds. When we listen
to this music, we do not hear it with the same ear as some young Marquis dancing
on the stage of the Opera in Versailles. We listen to it with an ear which is capable
of engaging with, while staying at a remove from, another musical universe
than our own. Although our ear is not immediately attuned to this universe, a
60
Harnoncourt (1985, p. 44). We have already come across this ‘quasi’ several times: it is
ritually invoked whenever rituals, magic and believes are mentioned … cf. p. 18, n. 3, or p. 72.
well-developed musical world nevertheless gives us access to so many add-on

intermediary appliances (the media, institutions, musical training) that for the first
time in history, we are able to enjoy several musics besides our own! Let us explain
this with an ethnological metaphor. Following in the footsteps of explorers, the
nineteenth-century anthropologists who described native people did not go native
themselves. However, instead of just trying to subjugate native people, like the
explorers who came before them, these anthropologists also sought to extract
knowledge from these other human societies, and this led them to keep different
cultures separate from their own, rather than taking down the walls between
them. Boulez was an explorer: he tore through a land of ancient songs with the
more efficient steel ploughshare of the instruments of his day, much as colonial
officers updated ‘inefficient’ traditional cultures by applying Western techniques
to conquered lands and peoples. In contrast, the stance of the Baroque revivalists
was akin to the anthropologists’: preferring to allow the music of another period
to be performed in the spirit of its own, different, system, they kept its tools and
techniques in order to hear the sounds which its produced when its own criteria
of efficiency were adhered to, rather than mould it to our own standards. Yet, the
Baroques did not go native for all that: on the contrary, they were only in a position
to perform early music ‘as it was in its day’ because they had access to all of our
contemporary musical expertise, starting with our understanding that music is an
autonomous phenomenon with its own historical perspective. This is the point of
M. de Certeau’s remark, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter: ‘The “return to
origins” is always a modernism as well.’
I have so far shed light only on the specific theoretical stakes, and significance,
of the debates surrounding Baroque music, leaving open the question of why
the Baroques eventually won over the ‘Moderns’. What are the grounds for one
interpretation being disqualified by another? One is tempted to say ‘there’s no
accounting for taste’…. Yet, this is not actually so! Contrarily to what is often
said about the subjective and fluctuating arbitrariness of taste, some tastes can
irrevocably destroy others by relying on particular objects and trends, taking
advantage of opportunities presented by social movements and musical tempos,
and everywhere infiltrating the objects, procedures and habits which lie between
us and music. It would be worth writing a detailed history of the paths which
the Baroques and the ‘Moderns’, each in their turn, traced between us and early
music, now that we have laid to rest the simplistic notion that a musicological
revolution put an end to erroneous interpretations of early music, together with the
no less simplistic idea that the popularity of historically informed performances of
Baroque music resulted merely from the recording companies’ manipulation of the
market. Writing the history of these paths would mean taking into account three
interwoven histories, which have followed related trends and fed off each other,
but have developed at different rates:
• A history focused on musicology, on specific traditions – organist, choral,

etc. – as well as on early forays into archives and early musical scores, and
on their particular system of musical notation, as well as on the organology

of surviving early instruments: as we have already seen, the threads which
this historical tradition wove between us and early music were never
really severed.
• The history of the slow crystallisation of music into institutions: this history
allowed music to become an autonomous reality and was a precondition for its
historicisation. As long as music meant life, expression, religion and rituals,
its function cancelled its reality and it could not have a past: in contrast, it is
contemporary audiences who gave this music a past.
• The history of our technical ability to preserve sound itself: with this
history, writing was set free, after having been the main source of musical
transmission and the guardian of its stability. Discs gave a new lease of life
to rhythm. The new focus on deriving unequal rhythms from apparently
fixed musical scores was only possible because music was now also being
transmitted through the ‘equal’, fixed sounds of recordings.
Although we have come full circle, these interwoven histories do not close the
history of the interpretation of Baroque music since the nineteenth century on
itself, so much as they make it spiral outwards. There was a silent counterpoint to
that quarrelsome history, which focused on differences in interpretation and taste:
the history of recordings. Thanks to the twentieth-century invention of the disc,
music – that impalpable object – finally was able to travel through time and space.
What is the place of sound itself – i.e. of the immediate material of music – in
the ‘humanly organised’61 linguistic – or quasi-linguistic – construction that is
music? How can we make the underground history of the gradual solidification
of sound compatible with the more conspicuous history of music, with its parallel
production of increasingly stable and autonomous musical objects? The history of
taste is secretly dependent on the history of sound recording.
The other, more radical, conclusion – or is it the same? – that can be drawn
from the history of the interpretation of Baroque music since the nineteenth
century is that there are neither ‘Moderns’ nor ‘Ancients’, only traitors. There
is always a price to pay for the faithful adherence to a particular mediator (early
instruments, the way early music was performed, etc.): in order to be operative,
this mediator must be blindly dependent on another. But then music is not a ready-
made object: it can only materialise in front of us through the articulation of a
series of interconnected instruments, procedures, media and interpreters. The fact
that musicians can draw on past objects and make them into something new is
a godsend for contemporary interpreters, however detrimental this may be for
composers. In contrast, visual artists have no choice but to create. We are faced
with an exemplary paradox: renewing the interpretation and the sounds of early
music, the Baroques relied heavily on the recording of sound: this invisible but
crucial contemporary mediator made it possible for them to adhere to now vanished
61
Quoting J. Blacking (1972–2000).
earlier mediators (early instruments, early French tastes, the counter-tenor, dance
music and recitatives, etc.). More decisively, the recording of sound affected the
construction of music, turning it into an object that was stable (in technical terms)
as well as a consumer product. Although this takes us back to the contemporary
notion that the Baroques renewed the range of products on offer in a saturated
music market, this was nevertheless a paradoxical achievement. Discs make music
into objects that we can purchase and place in front of us in order to compare and
enjoy them. Yet, this is very much at odds with the spirit of early French music,
which, even as it was being killed off by the Italians, cried out against the passive
skills of the homo musicalis, praising an earlier musical relationship involving
the ‘conversation’, the posture, and the gestures of the homo musicans – i.e. the
opposite of a relationship to a fixed object. As a good musicologist, Borrel asserted
in 1934 that ‘early musicians would not have enjoyed listening to the stereotypical
sound of gramophone performances’ (1934, p. 95). Protesting against the new trend
for equal sounds which mechanical recordings had introduced, Borrel was rather
nostalgically re-experiencing the feelings of the French when they contemplated
how soundly the equal beat of Italian music had defeated their own.
Yet, mediations do not cancel each other out: they accumulate and feed
off each other. The stabilisation and instrumentalisation of one area of music
through recordings does not forecast the end of musical performances, but
opens up different spaces for ‘live’ music. The solidity of discs is what allowed
contemporary interpreters to liberate themselves from the traditional approaches
taught in music schools, and reclaim the freedom of earlier interpretations. In
1990, the most effective media for the return to ‘authentic’ performances of
seventeenth-century music were called Harmonia Mundi or EMI, compact discs
and Virgin Megastores.
The Procession of Music Media
Focusing on mediation raises a question which is difficult to test pragmatically:

how should we approach the fact that music needs to present itself – or be
presented – to us in order that we may recognise it? The fact that the twentieth-
century reinterpretation of Baroque music led to the simultaneous coexistence of
two different versions of the ‘same’ early music, created a precious opportunity
to conduct a laboratory experiment in vivo – a rare event in the social sciences.
I wanted to investigate the contemporary debates provoked by conflicting
twentieth-century interpretations of early music in order to shed light on the way
in which music treats its objects in practice, focusing on the particular case of
Baroque music, which was performed, forgotten and modernised before it was
rediscovered and performed in its original, early, style – each time drawing on a
different configuration of its contradictory objects.
Sociologists hesitate to take music into account in their investigations, because
this object is so problematic that it constrains them to follow its rules, which they
prefer to destroy or ignore, in order to tailor their research to the needs of their
hypotheses. Yet, the contradictory reconstructions of the musical object which
resulted from different approaches to the interpretation of Baroque music, show
that it is not so easy for – musical or sociological – interpreters to constitute or
destroy it. Musical objects constitute that part of music which resists the passage
of time. Yet, this does not make them into ‘the’ Object of music, that is, an abstract
philosophical construct such as the ever-receding ideal object towards which
actual musicians strive. On the contrary, this object is the sum of the multitude of
procedures and media that music harnesses in order to endure. This concrete and
heterogeneous musical object can be dismantled, but this is an uneven process.
It requires reinterpretation, but piecemeal, using different procedures depending
on the forms it took at the time of its production (practices, codes, instruments,
written documents, etc.) and the role it was given at the time when it was brought
back to our attention (was it considered as evidence, as a testimonial to the past, as
a clue to a historical truth, as a means to create new practices?).
The sociology of the social construction of – scientific, technical or artistic –
facts is sometimes accused of relativism because it refuses to obey the autonomous
laws of the objects it studies. If objectivity is no longer possible, then power
struggles are all that is left. Nothing except untidy weeds can grow on the ashes of
objects that have been sacrificed, leading to naked and unprincipled confrontations
between rival powers, in chaotic relationships where nothing is guaranteed to last
and where nothing can be justified62 (by the actors) or explained (by sociologists).
The twentieth-century controversy surrounding Baroque music presents us with
a wonderful opportunity to put an end to the ‘all or nothing’ dimension of the
object – this term is too philosophical to be perfectly honest – and the stark choice
it presents the sociologist with: ‘It’s either me or chaos.’ Instead of an unbridgeable
gap between two centuries, this polemic substitutes an intricate loom of threads
connecting the music of Lully in Versailles, or Bach in Leipzig, to contemporary
record collectors, through the most diverse array of mediators of music imaginable.
I am not responsible for the introduction of this array of mediators. Instead, all the
different ways in which music is disseminated were brought to our attention, one
after the other, by this controversy – starting with its 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. What could better illustrate that transition, tradition and
translation are always at stake in this process of dissemination than notions such
as ‘Urtext’ and ‘high fidelity’, not to mention ‘true interpretation’? …
The fairly rapid and brutal destruction of the credibility of a musical taste
which this recent controversy powerfully and succinctly dramatised gives us an
unusually clear and concrete insight into the usual process through which tastes
62
Understood in the sense that Boltanski and Thévenot give to this term (2006).
are constructed – except that this process follows the reverse trajectory. That is, not
through a subjective assertion (‘I like that’), which would be the final confirmation
of its success. Through the slow projection of unstable musical relationships onto a
large number of heterogeneous and interdependent objects, this process gradually
leads music lovers to naturalise this music: as they start to recognise it, they feel as
though their recognition were born fully clothed from the music, Athena-like. The
strength of Western music does not derive from the superb objective coherence of
its tonality, allowing us to draw up a contemporary organology, with the rules of
composition, the composition of its orchestras, and the invention of well-balanced
musical forms: this coherence quickly dissolves into divergent fragments under the
lens of historical investigation. On the contrary, what gradually creates music is the
accumulation of the long series of small secondary instances through which it was
stabilised onto various objects – the invention of the keyboard, the simplification
of written codes, the spelling out of a harmonic rule, the standardisation of the
bores and the chords of instruments, the naming of formal structures such as the
sonata, the invention of the rules of solfège, the stabilisation of the tones of the
chromatic scale, etc. Music gradually came into being as musicians and the objects
which they use started to incorporate this set of rules, to the point that it became
inconspicuous and no longer needed to be sighted.
Striking at the very heart of the tastes of the ‘Moderns’, the Baroques
dismantled and destroyed precisely this chain of stabilisations, by reconstituting
the chain with their own interpretations, winning the argument in the process.
Since the early nineteenth century, the ‘Moderns’ had laid claim to the musical
repertoire of the previous centuries: however, the disruption of the tradition of
early music led them to graft a whole set of wigs and crutches – the objects of this
music – onto their music, in order to make it sound credible to their ears. There
was a systematic clash – sequential then simultaneous – between the different
series of objects which the ‘Moderns’ added to early music in order to adapt it to
their tastes (recent instruments and performance techniques, edited musical scores,
equal scales and rhythms) and the series of archaeologically reconstituted objects
which the Baroques restored to this music (its treatises, early instruments original
musical scores). This made them both appear conspicuous, exposing the fact that
musical tastes ordinarily naturalise these objects, allowing them to be perceived
as non-determined. However, what the debates surrounding Baroque music show,
on the contrary, is the extreme dependence of the subject of taste on the series of
objects through which he constitutes himself. Conversely, these debates also shed
light on the fact that these objects conform to the musicians’ desire for recognition,
rather than to any sort of internal logic drawing on history, tonality, harmony or
aesthetic laws. What else could Goléa’s outcry mean? Having been proven wrong
by objects, all he can do is say that he does not care, since their only justification is
that he chose them himself. It is a case of ‘What do I care about all your arguments,
if she’s the one I love?’
The Baroques have not taken us back to the past, they have now reconnected
us to the forsaken objects of early music with their forays into the past, securing
this music a place in the present. As a result, it can safely be assumed that it is
less and less likely that performances of Bach and Handel will follow Boulez’
views. Similarly, there will be fewer and fewer people to imitate Goléa’s defiant
stance towards the convincing arguments of the ‘Baroqueux’. Contrary to what
he wished to persuade us (and himself) of with his profession of love for modern
interpretations of Baroque music, there are no stable validations for music, and
there never is a finished musical object that we can faithfully rely on. All that
underpins that elusive ideal – our love of music – is only a chain of habits and
things. What the Baroques did was to pull apart the framework of habits and other
invisible conditions on which the love of Baroque music depended and which the
‘Moderns’ had erected, tearing it down one component at a time in order to rebuild
it on their own terms. The weakness of explanations which attempt to understand
the love of music in terms of the subject or the object is clear: contemporary
subjects were left isolated and powerless as the objects of early music betrayed
them, in the same way that in a previous era, these objects could not impose their
rationale by themselves without the support of musicians. Subjects think that they
have dominion over objects, but they are in fact powerless without them: taking
objects away reveals how dependent subjects are on them. Objects are powerless
too when no one takes them seriously: the fact that musicians were aware of the
objects of early music didn’t stop them from refusing to endorse them. The gradual
process through which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Classical interpretations
of Baroque music revised it, sheds light on this symmetrical powerlessness.
Despite the fact that the objects of early music included so many injunctions to use
them properly, not a single treatise, table, symbol or instrument proved capable
of making itself heard by ‘Modern’ interpreters intent on approaching them
through another set of musical validations. When, as was often the case, it was not
possible to compromise between what the surviving fragments of Baroque music
prescribed and what ‘Modern’ musicians were after, it was the objects of early
music that were systematically distorted, ignored or forcefully adapted to fit the
new requirements. Treatises were left unread, early instruments restored, musical
scores revised, and the pitch and temperament of Baroque music became equal.
All the traces of this music which a material format had managed to stabilise
were completely disregarded if they contravened contemporary musical means.
Conversely, as soon as the historical accuracy of these means became a concern,
the tastes they represented collapsed entirely, unable to withstand the number of
early objects which all of a sudden were being earnestly reclaimed from the past
and brought back to the present.
In other words, the process which I have just described can also be
understood – if so desired – as a methodical critique of the notion that the history
of the interpretation of Baroque music retraces face-to-face encounters between
subjects and objects. Instead, this history presents us with an apology of mediation.
‘Autonomous’ objects became powerless, and lost any hold they once had enjoyed
over the relationships which they had left: this is what happened to the surviving
remnants of early music before they were rediscovered in the twentieth century.
The same was true of the ‘free’ subject: music lovers with traditional tastes felt
betrayed and abandoned when ‘their’ music suddenly evaporated as the Baroques’
interpretations of early music usurped those of the ‘Moderns’. It is a myth that
subjects of taste control their tastes and are in a face-to-face relationship with the
object against which they measure themselves.63 Either they are introduced to each
other by the whole gamut of relationships created by their mediators, and they
do indeed recognise each other (they may well deny that these mediators exist,
but this merely points to their hidden presence), or these relationships have been
severed and they no longer exist. Focusing on the actual controversies which have
accompanied the construction (or the destruction) of a taste never leads to either a
‘Subject’ with a capital ‘S’ or an ‘Object’ with a capital ‘O’. Instead, this leads to
a heterogeneous series of mediations which are all located in the space which lies
in-between human beings and things, and which are more or less deeply inscribed
into matter, as well as more or less widely recognised and shared: the instruments
which are used to play the music, the texts which are read, the formats which are
used, the practices which are repeated time after time, the habits which have been
incorporated into bodies. In contrast, the world of music is reduced to nothing
when we try to refine it into neatly separate subjects and objects.
The stakes of this investigation are becoming clear: can any more be said –
in the field of music – about this intermediary world, which is itself filled with
mediations, and where human beings and their objects are mutually defined by
the artificial appendages which they present to each other in order to be able to
engage with each other? The relationship between human beings and their objects
resembles a strange dance, or game, where everything is being played out in the
interval between the moment when they let go of each other – never losing sight of
each other, whatever the distance between them – and the instant when they catch
hold of each other again. The image of a game powerfully evokes this dynamic in
French, where the same word ‘play’ evokes at once the performance of musicians
and of ball players, who must neither ‘lose’ the ball nor ‘bury’ it. We don’t just
play music, we also play with the objects of music, sending them out of our bodies,
without losing them to the chaotic and indifferent sounds which surround us, and
without destroying them by reducing them to the status of tools servile to the
creative subject. How can we speak of a musical universe which believes neither
in objects nor in subjects, and whose investigation no longer implies attributing
properties alternatively to objects (by making music the product of their laws) or
to subjects (by endowing the aesthetic subject with all the attributes of the power
63
To be more precise, this is how philosophers narrate their own tastes: thus, in my
investigation of Adorno, who represents an extreme case, I also account for the way in
which, in his particular case, he really performs his own particular tastes in terms of such
an subject-object opposition, which perfectly fits all the characteristics of his personality.
Overall, it is important to avoid giving this subject-object duo a privileged status – or indeed
an exclusive status, as in aesthetics (where it is considered positive) and critical sociology
(where it is viewed as negative); cf. infra, Chapter 2, pp. 59ff.
to decide which music to choose)? Is it possible to allege that there is no more

than a dual dynamic involving claiming, rejecting, and returning to something,
which is at work between human beings, who are nothing if they cannot project
their relationships onto lasting things, and objects which are nothing in the eyes of
men if they haven’t delicately modelled them? Let us not fear: we shall be more
than amply compensated for the object’s loss of autonomy and the subject’s loss of
power, with the discovery of a new intermediary world teeming with mediations
and free, at long last, from the rule of the subject-object couple. We shall do very
well out of this!
Paving the way toward the restoration of the mediators of the musical world is
precisely what this book seeks to do.
Transition
‘Unhappy Music’ Which
‘Fade[s] Away as Soon as It Is Born’…:
Painting-and-Objects versus
Music-and-Society?
Lot, Orpheus: in the Jewish text, the wife runs ahead; the mistress follows behind
in the Greek legend; in the first text, the woman has been frozen; in the second, she
has vanished; in one case, she is forever visible, permanent; in the other, she is lost
for ever, impossible to find.
M. Serres, Statues, 1987, pp. 331–2
Drawing comparisons between the different arts used to be one of the standard
exercises of Classical rhetoric.1 Image versus sound: more recently the opposition
of the visual arts to music has been understood as the archetype for the opposition
between the external and visual relationship a subject has with an object, and the
inward and sonorous relationship a collective in action has with itself – in short,
according to this theory, painting sides with objects and music with the social.
W.J. Ong (1982)2 radically formulated this binary opposition between ‘orality and
literacy’ in light of the ideas of the Toronto school (McLuhan 1968). He draws
an impressive list of the characteristics of these techniques of communication,
proceeding mechanically through antithetic pairs: thus, orality is ‘additive’,
‘aggregative’, ‘redundant’, ‘conservative’, ‘close to the human life world’,
‘agonistic’, ‘participatory’, ‘homeostatic’, and ‘situational’, whereas writing is
‘abstract’, ‘objective’, ‘distanced’, ‘analytic’, and ‘subordinative’. However,
1
Saint Augustine set this trend with his De musica, not to mention his first treatise
De pulchro et apto, which contrasts the immediate beauty of the visual arts to the proper,
‘adapted’ beauty of the gestural arts, based on a miraculous echo between one structure
and another (cf. H. Davenson 1942); I am grateful to J.-Y. Hameline for his luminous oral
presentation of these beautiful texts.
2
The same thesis has been developed in order to make a critical apology of the virtues
of music in the face of bureaucracy and the control of pen-pushers, cf. Attali (1977, cf.
supra, pp. 57–9), or Shepherd et al. (1977), according to whom the pregnant, immediate,
energetic, fluid and elusive character of sound is linked to the universe of oral societies,
which he argues have no ‘preconceived abstract framework’, whereas ‘With Western man,
space is an empty hopper made up of horizontal and vertical dimensions into which objects
are placed with direct relevance to the visual relationship that an observer has to these
objects’ (p. 17).
rather than focusing on the characteristics of orality and literacy, and arguing that
they are intrinsic to music and painting, it may be more productive to rethink
the comparison of music and painting in light of the place which these two arts
allocate to the material and human formats on which they rely.
On the one hand, with paintings and statues, the model for that relationship
is static and optimally objective and external: here is an object in front of us. In
this case, the work of art is nearly identical to its material format. Conversely, this
object is nearly autonomous from those who gaze at it, and vanish in its shadow.
The triangular relationship between the object, the subject and their intermediaries
looks linear.
On the other hand, with musical performances, the model for that relationship
is dynamic and minimally objective and external: there is nothing, except for the
instruments, and we have to gather together in order to ‘make’ music. There is a
maximum distance between music and its objects (they merely are its ‘instruments’)
and, conversely, the music and the group bringing it to life are nearly identical.
In this case, the triangular relationship between the object, the subject and their
intermediaries looks circular, and the mysterious object of music is what vanishes
from this montage.
Stone and Wind
Music does not use stone or canvas to stabilise its object. The monumental density
of the plastic arts makes it impossible to distinguish between the three moments
of their contemplation: from what it owes to my own gaze, to the intermediaries’
work of monstration, and to the intrinsic properties of the graven object, which
lies there, inert, and is totally separate from the gaze which I cast upon it. With
music, the fluidity of time displaces the weight of the object. Its medium – sound –
exists only when emitted. The musical object has no intrinsic materiality, since it
depends on material supports in order to sound. Indeed, this comes at a price: there
is no market for musical works – they cannot be placed in a chest, exhibited in an
auction hall, sent across the Atlantic to send their value soaring. Thus, Leonardo
da Vinci thought that ‘unhappy music’ was inferior to painting, which ‘does not
fade away as soon as it is born’.3
Personally, I have little time for the dual opposition of painting and music:
although often repeated, it is more symptomatic than it is analytical. The history
of music (or music understood as a history) is on the contrary the history of the
progressive production of a sound object analogous to visual objects, even though
the nature of sound seemed to make this impossible. It may seem obvious to
think that the arts should be determined on the basis of their basic materials, but
this is in fact misleading. Although the opposition of painting and music which
3
In ‘Painting, Music, and Poetry’, in the edition of the Notebooks published by
Oxford University Press (2008, p. 187).
Painting-and-Objects versus Music-and-Society? 211
is commonly believed to be self-evident is in reality deeply unsatisfactory, it

nevertheless can – at a pinch – allow us to understand the contrast between the
literatures that these arts have inspired: it is as though critics could only work
on ‘their’ art by going against the grain of the others. It seems to me that in fact,
the opposite paths which they follow do not so much concern the arts themselves
than their analyses, which are constrained to investigate the relationship of art and
matter, and of art and society.
Art adds another dimension to Durkheim’s theory of mediation: the tangibility
of objects which offer some tactile resistance. Yet, one of the arts, music, deprives
its analysts of the reassuring solidity that characterises the plastic arts, encouraging
critics to contribute to the prolific literature on this subject. Leaning discreetly on
the tangible presence of visual art works, these critics can in turn conjure up, and
make disappear, an infinite number of mediators, who are all too happy to play
hide-and-seek with them. It is not by chance if the profusion of works on the history
of art and art criticism4 contrasts so starkly with the scarcity of writings on music.
The literature on music is at once poorer and more divided: it is caught between
two contradictory models, neither of which is adequate. With great difficulty, it
tries to squeeze into the subject-object mould which frames the discourses that it
awkwardly borrows from the visual arts. Either (in the case of Classical music, in
particular) music is aligned on painting, and critics try to speak of it as though it
were a solid object fixed in its frame, thereby letting this art of doing slip away
between their fingers. Or (in the case of ethnic or popular music, usually) they
only emphasise its collective production, allowing the musical object to disappear
behind the collective effusion of the group. Either way, it is a wonder that the
critical literature on music has not altogether given up on the object of music.
Music disturbs any discourse which expects to rely on tangible objects.
Musical commentators have often noted that speech does not adequately allow
them to talk about music. Critics are not lost for words when they are face to face
with a motionless image. In contrast, there is nothing to be said about the invisible,
evanescent, sounds which form the basis of musical creations. What an odd
situation: by acknowledging its limitations,5 speech pays homage to the mystery
of music, conjuring up its counterpart: the silent love of music, which is both the
4
Indeed, the visual arts are so abundantly discussed, that their commentators can
hijack the word ‘art’ in order to speak only of the plastic arts without even realising that
they are guilty of usurpation.
5
Cf. Jankélévitch, on carmen, i.e. charm: ‘Weary of analysing the un-analysable, our
intellect decides, as a last resort to refer to this elusive and disappointing residue, which is
something like the spiritual scent that surrounds existence, as the “Je-ne-sais-quoi”’ (1974,
p. 346). See also the Lévi-Strauss epigraph quoted on p. 1. Bourdieu returns to the idea that
music is ‘the “pure art” par excellence’ (103): however, he introduces it in an implicitly
indirect style, as he so often does, giving us the actors’ perspective without spelling out his
own critical assessment of their vision, as though it were self-evident: ‘Music is the most
spiritualistic of the arts … Music is hand-in-glove with the soul … Placing itself beyond
words, music says nothing and has nothing to say’ (1993b, p. 103).
original cause of musical activity and its ultimate aim. I love Bach. Everything
else is just hot air.6 No one questions this shared understanding, whether from the
inside or the outside, as it lies hidden at the heart of a closed world, where musicians
are in amongst themselves and where those who are merely ‘amateurs’ can never
really enter.7 Music has no tangible object to offer critics, nothing for them to get
their teeth into. It can only present them with mediations: instruments, scores,
sounds, languages, interpreters, concert halls, disks, the media, etc. This sends us
back to the paradox of critical sociology which I highlighted in the introduction:
this discipline having entirely constituted itself on the basis of the plastic arts,
using the opposite rhetorical strategy. However much this may infuriate art lovers,
critical sociologists must bravely reveal the real, invisible or actively hidden,
relationships that constitute and lie behind art objects which misleadingly appear
self-evident. With music, the obvious and the hidden change places. It is hardly
surprising, then, if music wrong-foots sociological discourses: it spontaneously
shows them what ought to be hidden (relationships, mediations, performances,
group dynamics), but denies them a primary tangible object to get their hands on.
The impediments which critical sociologists face when they analyse music
makes music twice as difficult to work on as painting: firstly, they must try to make
music imitate painting, and to give its objects the tangibility of those of the visual
arts;8 secondly, they must try to match that critique of the object, which has itself
only just been so tortuously developed. Investigations of music thus followed one
of two very different paths: either they struggled to make the object of music
more stable, the better to study it (hence the privilege granted to scores); or they
automatically dismissed the object of music, adopting a critical stance which it
surely might deserve as much as other artistic objects if only it were as tangible.
And of course, as soon as they returned the musical object to its social environment,
they immediately invoked ethnological definitions of music, according to which it
acts as an adhesive for groups as they constitute themselves:
As our knowledge of music increases and our musical experiences expand, this
area of investigation is becoming more widespread and more fragmented. On the
surface, relationships are being established between its different sectors, which
6
This is also true of jazz: cf. C. Graña, on the ‘legendary nondefinition of jazz’:
‘Question: “What is jazz?” Answer: “If you have to ask you’ll never know”’ (1971, p. 33n).
7
In the musical world, this basic behaviour involves the tribal identity check of any
unidentified third party: ‘Is he a musician?’ Cf. the expostulation a musician – a ‘real’ one,
an instrumentalist – directed at the composer (and, even more importantly, administrator)
M. Decoust: ‘As for you, you’re not a musician!’ in ‘Le Métier de musicien’ (Gumplowicz
et al. (eds) 1978, p. 77).
8
Through a predictable but nevertheless rather absurd reversal, Classical musicology
has now reached the point where it will only recognise as music music which is written. The
refusal of this exclusion led to the development of new critical approaches to music (Durant
1984, Kerman 1985, Bergeron and Bohlman (eds) 1992).
have now been marked out by techniques and technology, by the development
of stringed instruments, by acoustics, by solfège and music composition,
psychology and musicology, and the history of musical civilisations and our own
lived history. However, there are perhaps deeper rifts running across this now
vast area, although they may nevertheless be less obvious and better concealed.
(P. Schaeffer 1966, p. 10)
In Search of a Universal Foundation
Although this situation has led to repeated calls for a more scientific approach,
such calls seem to me, on the contrary, to be symptomatic of the fact that we are
getting hold of the wrong end of the stick:
We need to move on from musicological confusion and achieve explicit and

rigorous analyses, which may serve as a universal framework … The theory
or the science of art – although as yet still largely unfounded – precede the
sociology and the psychology of art. (J. Molino 1975, p. 53)
Seeking a rigorous semiology of music, Molino is less interested in the problem

of representation than he is keen to find its ‘universal framework’. He located this
framework in Saussure’s structuralism, and paid him homage for having at last
created a ‘universal object, eluding the social sciences’ (ibid., p. 54). The way in
which he formulates this ambition is strikingly evocative of the nostalgic claim
which Nattiez laid to the possibility of aesthetic transcendence, and which I have
already discussed: Molino’s regression towards a positivistic universal framework
for musical signification is the flipside of Nattiez’s complementary regression
towards aesthetics.
The main theoretical hypothesis behind Molino’s semiology of music is that
all signifying phenomena are symbolically ‘tripartite’, which means that music
has a ‘triple mode of existence, as arbitrarily isolated object, as produced object,
and as perceived object’ (Molino, ibid., p. 37). Molino thus argues that analyses of
music should distinguish between three closely connected dimensions, which he
calls ‘poietic, neutral, and esthesic’ (p. 46). According to him, the benefit of this
approach is that it grants new autonomy to the third term of his equation, making
it possible to avoid the ‘confusionist pathos of pseudo-linguists’ (p. 61). This is
because esthesis promotes active engagement with a material, as opposed to the
passive reception of a work’s intrinsic signification or of its composer’s intentions,
inverting what Nattiez calls the second arrow on the right in ‘the classic schema
for communication’ (1990, p. 16). However, far from criticising the rigidity of
the Saussurian model by refusing to accept its watertight separation of language
and language facts, as well as their hierarchical relationship, in order to try to
move towards more open models in which speakers and the system might be in
interaction, Nattiez constantly justifies the autonomy of art works by invoking
this tripartite model, turning this clever idea into the Trojan horse of his militantly
aesthetic stance on the semiology of music. Although Nattiez initially declares
that ‘the neutral level’ is useful only as ‘a kind of crib or mnemonic’ (p. 31), he
focuses on it exclusively, at the expense of the active, immanent, processes of the
production and reception of music, indefinitely postponing their investigation to
future research. Rather than inverting the arrows of the S-M-R schema, he turns
them into barriers, reinstating internal musical analyses and shielding them from
criticism. This dominant trend in the semiology of music,9 which positions itself as
a hyper-theory of music, as well as being hostile to mediation, tried to rival musical
analysis, which it considered flawed and incoherent. Yet the very incoherence of
musical analysis is its strength: predictably enough, musical analysis won the
argument over semiology, easily assimilating the metalanguages which were
supposedly going to make it obsolete.
The curious phrase ‘neutral level’ (i.e. ‘ne-uter’, neither one thing nor the other,
in Latin) which Nattiez uses to describe the fact that art works as objects cannot be
reduced to their production or reception prepared his retreat, and meek reversion
to, to aesthetics. For what could be less neutral than turning music into an object?
The word ‘neutral’ cancels out the issues surrounding the construction of the
musical object, by automatically isolating it in a curious space: although this space
is positive enough to remain free from any psychological or social influences, it
is nevertheless defined negatively, as being ‘neither one thing nor the other’. To
speak of mediation is to refuse to say that the objects through which we pass are
neutral. Isn’t this what the semiologist Louis Marin (1989) sets out to do when
he meditates on the Arezzo frescoes’ supporting walls, examining the angles at
which they are set, the spaces which they create, and the space which they allocate
to onlookers? Although the semiology of music rejected it, mediation was at the
heart of the semiology of representation which Marin – a true semiologist – put in
place for Quattrocento painting: is it not paradoxical that the narrow disciplinary
perspective of semiologists of music blinded them to the fact that music is an ideal
semiological model, since it is a theory of representation in action?
A Noted Music
There are not many authors who, like Schaeffner, shed light on the anthropological
transformation which their own transcription technique produces:
9
The semiology of music has also gone down other paths, such as the investigation of
the ‘paratext’ – i.e. literary markers – which goes with music (cf. Escal 1990). Drawing on
ethnomethodology, T. DeNora (1986, 1988, 1993) proposes a pragmatic and constructivist
approach to musical signification (which led her to produce excellent analyses of the uses
of music, cf. De Nora 2000).
Works of art resemble the society which performs them almost as much as
they do the texts which supposedly preserve them … Perhaps we would see
more variations between different interpretations of a single work than between
different custodians of a single primitive song. (1980, pp. 37–9)
It is not by chance if Schaeffner refers to primitive song: the exoticism of oral

music is a side effect of the ethnocentrism of writing. Ethnomusicologists are
keenly aware of the difficulties raised by the transcription of oral music: the
boundaries of what they have to transcribe are not a given for them. Writing
on ritual music, Jakobson (1932/73, pp. 102–3) gives a good example of this: a
musicologist attempting to transcribe the tune which an African is playing on the
flute, is under the impression that the tune changes every time the flute player
plays it again, because he is sensitive to variations of tone. Yet, the African asserts
that he has been playing the same thing all the time, because, for him, contrasts
between different timbres, accents, and rhythms constitute the pertinent variables
of music. It may be that what this mythical little scene summarises all too well
are the relationships of guilt which lie between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Certainly this
anecdote seems ubiquitous, from the psychology of music10 to critical thought
(Blacking uses it to denounce the Westerner’s ethnocentric blindness)11 and to
structuralism, where it is invoked in order to underplay the power of raw sounds
and emphasise the need to define the arbitrary system of values which gives music
meaning: ‘Like musical scales, phonemic patterning is an intervention of culture
in nature, an artefact imposing logical rules upon the sound continuum’ (Jakobson
1957, p. 17).
This paradoxically led ethnomusicologists to seek to make oral music visible
to the eye, using all the hyper-visual effects of modern media: as a result, they
may not so much make it visible as disguise its invisiblity. It was a case of ‘If we
can’t write it down, let’s film it!’ In a survey which asked French musicologists
questions touching on the development of audiovisual media, V. Lochmann (1988)
drew a striking portrait of ethnologists wrong-footed by the new stability which
the object of music had acquired through systematic filming. More radically,
the need acknowledged by all for a technique where music ‘can both be seen
and heard perfectly’ (Rouget, quoted p. 205) cast doubt on the musical objects
presented in ethnological films.12 Although Lochmann argues that ‘these problems
10
See for example the Preface F. Escal wrote for the second French edition of
Daniélou’s Sémantique musicale (1967, p. 3).
11
He relates exactly the same anecdote, as though it were his personal experience
(2000, pp. 18–19)!
12
Lochmann relates several amusing anecdotes touching on the material conditions of
the shooting, the questions raised by the staging of the film, the presence of the filmmaker,
the way the camera can suddenly make the musician feel self-conscious as actor, and the
‘typical’ attributes (and musical developments) which the film gives to the ceremony, but
which are in fact the consequence of the exceptional character the film lends it. Another
do not only affect the cinema, [but] also arise when recording disks’, his survey
shows clearly that ethnomusicologists have become increasingly aware that as a
result of its excessive visibility, their very object of study, oral music, has become
difficult to question: films present it as immediate, leading to a sort of theoretical
blindness, which couldn’t be further from an anthropological focus on the means of
signification.13 Although our collections of instruments, oscillograms, recordings,
films and videos are precious, the so-called oral music that ethnomusicologists
bring to our attention says more about the various modern techniques used to
transcribe it than it does about the mysterious object of a music which visual
formats cannot capture.
Musicologists and ethnomusicologists are so busy ensuring that they do not
allow the notes of the music they work on to escape them, that they have clumsily
forgotten that music is borne on thin air. In their attempt to fix this elusive object
onto paper or on film, they have become insensitive to its metamorphoses, and to
the key role which they play in these transformations. Reassured by the stability
of the objects they work on, historians of art excel at the art of revealing the secret
mobility of these objects, and the erudite pleasure which they take in tracing the
many avatars of a single art work is multiplied by the fact that visual works appear
to be resolutely fixed when we look at them standing on their plinths, or nailed
to the wall for all eternity. In their attempt to immobilise an art of movement,
to stop the flow that musicians bring to life, those who work on music have
trouble imitating the intellectual nimbleness of art historians, who venture down
the opposite path, by bringing back to life the movements which artists represent
frozen in time.14
anecdote concerns the lighting of the spirits of the dead, who are asked to come closer to
the spotlights!
13
Such as J. Goody’s (1979) focus on the lists, formula and tables which led to the
growth of the rational mind, as opposed to a discussion of the development of the timeless
capabilities of Man.
14
This may be the key to understanding why, in the lines by M. Serres which I
quoted in the epigraph to this section, Orpheus and Lot’s predicaments are the reverse of
each other. Serres’ book is a philosophy of sculpture, which is all lifeless bodies, objects
with the features of subjects, and subjects as hard as stone. With fine intellectual rigour,
Serres ends his book on a counterpoint. Taking the perfectly symmetrical stories of these
‘ghosts’ – Lot and Orpheus – who both abandoned their wives to die, he presents musicians
with an admirable philosophy of music: ‘a woman is frozen solid in the first text, while
another vanishes in the second; in one case, the woman remains permanently visible, in the
other she is lost forever and cannot be found again.’ What a beautiful account of music as
sculpture’s Other.
The Letter or the Spirit
In other words, the first solution to the paradox of music was to visualise it
verbally, mistaking the score (or its more recent audiovisual avatars) for the music
itself. However, those who were mindful of the elusive character of music opted
for another solution. Invoking its spirit rather than its letter, they found another
way around the paradox of music, by emphasising its miraculous independence
from any medium. In this tradition, which suited philosophers better than the
musicological grind, music was ‘pure form as its very essence’ (Langer 1942,
p. 209). This pure essence allowed an immediate and privileged access to Being,
and evoked the hermetic language of the gods, as in Kierkegaard’s magnificent
writings. Kierkegaard’s mystical vision of music rests on the fact that its absence
of signification makes it immediate: ‘when language stops, music begins’ (1992,
p. 80). Similarly, Hugo said in his William Shakespeare that ‘Music expresses that
which cannot be said, and which cannot be suppressed’ (2001, p. 91). Several
philosophers of aesthetics are content to repeat this paradox, without challenging
it, as though its mystery were enough to justify it – and some musicologists do
the same in their introductions, as a kind of exorcism. P. Schaeffer powerfully
develops this idea in the following lines:
All the other objects which we are aware of speak of something other than
our consciousness: using a human language, they describe the world to us, in
accordance with our notions about it. Sound objects, musical structures … are
no longer on a mission to inform: they veer away from the descriptive world …
all the better to speak to our whole being about ourselves. (1966, p. 662)
Towards a Focus on the Media, Hybrid Objects and Mediators of Music
There is no need for this eternal oscillation between overemphasising the

materiality of music, as musicologists do when they confuse music with the paper
on which it is written,15 and underestimating its materiality, as when philosophers
in the throes of inspiration mistake the air blowing through a windpipe for the
Spirit. Music has long struggled to grasp its own materiality. Music teems with
hybrid objects, and the space which lies between us and music is filled with these
15
Despite systematically leafing through the works of three great musicologists,
M.F. Bukofzer (1947), C. Rosen (1971) and G. Pestelli (1984), I found no sign of any
of them distinguishing between the musical scores which these scholars discuss and the
music which the scores transcribe. Although all three of them are concerned with the
development of the musical style which led from the Baroque to Classicism, they are so
quick to read the music into the scores that they are blind to one of the major transitions
which the Classical style operated: after years of writing down the music that was being
performed, we now performed written music.
objects. The significance of these objects has escaped both the musicologists,
for whom they are only the media of music, and philosophers of aesthetics, who
turn this exemplary art of mediation into an art of internal immediacy. So long as
we continue to refuse to focus on the construction of the object of music itself,
its physical absence will persist in wrong-footing us and we will continue to be
tempted to make music into either a natural object or a pure essence: the only way
to speak of music is to delegate to musicians the task of making it surge from
its objects.
From instruments, to scores and to disks, the material objects which produce
music tell us that it belongs to the physical world, challenging the notion that it is a
pure essence. Conversely, since music depends on instrumentalists, producers and
teachers playing, interpreting and broadcasting the material objects which produce
music, its human mediators also tell us that it cannot be confused with weighty
and static visible objects. Music is an art of real presence as opposed to an art of
representation. It is an art of the necessary sonorous intermediaries which come
between the musician and sounds. Music cannot easily be delegated to either its
material objects or the ‘imagination’ – we lack an equivalent term for the realm of
sound – of the subjects. For music to exist, both its sociology and its physics must
constantly be reinvented.
This is why it is so interesting to focus on an art which isn’t defined by the
closure of a finished object, but by the active mobilisation of a large number of
participants, from human beings to things, instruments, written documents, spaces
and devices. In part, what music does is something that other arts also do: it creates
objects for human beings and human beings for these objects, using semi-human
and semi-material hybrids. Nevertheless, because its forms are inextricably linked
to the possibilities of the medium of sound, music allows a specific installation:
the objects through which it passes distinguish it from other ways of creating
a world. This is what allows us to love music without endowing it either with
the seductive evanescence of delusions or with the solidity of an inert object left
there by its creator. According to A. Schaeffner, instruments and writing are not
at odds with each other, but prolong each other in the sense that both of these
media conspire to gradually tear music away from the body: ‘in this way, thanks
to instruments, music may have managed to a relative extent to sever its ties with
the body, before severing them from instruments (and the voice) through writing.’16
To make a musical object visible is just not to comment on it: on the contrary, this
16
1980, p. 307. The notion that music progressively extracted itself from the physical
and social body of man in order to be placed into objects is often presented the other way
around, in the context of a critical perspective seeking to reveal the fundamentally social
character of a practice which Westerners have covered up with autonomous music. Cf.
Blacking’s remark, with its characteristic reliance on the ‘but one’ formula, that ‘Venda
music is founded not on melody, but on a rhythmical stirring of the whole body of which
singing is but one extension’ (2000, p. 27). This sociologistic stance already cancels out the
work that musicians do to instrumentalise and objectify music.
already involves making it, transposing a physical performance into a fixed object.
In other words, it is this process that we must seek to analyse: it cannot simply be
taken for granted as one of the means that music can rely on.
Chapter 7
‘What Can You Hear?’:
An Ethnographic Study of a Solfège Lesson
My music is not modern, it is merely poorly performed

A. Schoenberg, quoted by R. Leibowitz, 1986, p. 24
This chapter is the result of an ethnographic study of a solfège lesson.1 This study
asked a simple question: how do we get from the reciprocal indifference displayed
by children and sounds when there is bedlam in the classroom, to the dual
process which allows sounds to be recognised as musical by young musicians,
and musicians to achieve musical recognition for their ability to hear sounds?
As the ethnography and the history of solfège show, the paradoxical importance
of that musical scapegoat – solfège is constantly being targeted by reforms – can
be grasped only by looking at the fundamental role which this eternal defendant
plays in the classroom, where it has the opposite function of musical prosecutor.
‘What can you hear?’: the prosecuted becomes the prosecutor, revealing the rough
underside of the beauty of sound. Solfège reconstructs the empire of music on the
basis of its own expulsion from music.
How can the first mechanisms which produce music be retraced and
comprehended on the basis of music as it looms here in front of us? How is it
possible to give music its place in the classroom, when the children are so
scattered – that is to say, when their thoughts are solicited by such a wide range
of things (their friends, their teacher’s moustache, their parents, their instruments,
their schoolbooks, etc.)? And how does music become a shared reality on the basis
of which everything else is evaluated? What happens when, inverting the reasoning
of musicians, we take music (that word which is able to recreate the unity of the
divided musical world) to be the most solid term, or result, which they produce,
music being all the more powerful for their thinking that their relationships begin
with it and that without it nothing else would mean anything.
What happens if, instead of taking music as a given and asking how it is taught,
what the obstacles to its dissemination are, and why it is not evenly shared by the
population, we essay the proposition that music does not exist in advance, and
focus instead on the way in which a certain number of people come to establish it
in their midst? What is the place of music in the relationship between parents and
1
This ethnographic study of a music lesson is based on two studies of music schools
and the teaching of music in France (Hennion et al. 1983; Hennion, Schnapper 1986), the
results of which were reprinted in Comment la musique vient aux enfants (Hennion 1988),
pp. 5–32.
their children: what aspect of their relationship does music inhabit? What is the
place of music in the relationship between parents and schools: what shifts occur
through this resort to an institution? What is place of music in the relationship
between children and their teachers: how do teachers manage both to lead children
to model themselves on them and then allow themselves to be overshadowed
by the accomplishment of this task? And, finally, what is the place of music in
the relationship between musicians? The shared object that holds their society
together, music, must be deciphered, in the same way that ethnologists decipher
the founding myths of a tribe.
What’s in a Classroom …?
How can we speak of what goes on in a classroom, when – exercising our dubious
prerogative as sociologists – we consider the classroom with a cold eye, without
assuming a priori that we know the object of the gathering, and without feeling
that we must defend the teacher’s pedagogic skill, his faith in the musical abilities
of children, the value of his methodology, or even music itself?
First of all, we have a gathering of children. Waiting outside the door, they leave
their parents and join their friends in a moment of transient disorder. This marks a
first divide, between the inside and the outside. The dear child’s family, his record
of achievements, his protective mum, and his already knowing big brother, all stay
at the door. These are important mediators: they are the ones who bring the child
to his lessons, day after day, holding him by the hand, and who jealously take him
away at the end of the day, asking him what he did, whether he has started learning
about notes yet – beating on drums and singing is all very well, but … – and how
he is coping with musical dictations. However, these mediators are shown the
door, as it were: that simple boundary line transforms them. Whether it turns them
into role models, threats or love objects whom the children want to please – we
shall let them choose which part they wish to play – for now, these characters have
become external to the children’s musical schooling.
Let us go through the door and resume our observation from within the
classroom: the children look interchangeable as they stream into the room, their
unruliness clashing with the orderly structure of the rows of desks. They need a
moment before they can get into their new skins: they need to take stock of the
classroom before they can leave the family cocoon and fully enter their new state.
There is no better means of influencing the disposition of people’s minds than
using the layout of a room. Let us consider the classroom itself.
The tables have simply been set out in front of a musical instrument. Yet this
orderly layout already anticipates everything that is to come.2
2
This is probably why we speak of a ‘classroom’. This word is a gift to the sociologist:
it names the underlying function of this space, drawing attention to something that is so
obvious that it is invisible, much as Poe’s ‘Stolen Letter’.
‘What Can You Hear?’: An Ethnographic Study of a Solfège Lesson 223
Figure 7.1 A classroom
Children Sitting at Their Desks
The children are on one side of the room. Or rather – and we shall see that this
makes a big difference – this is where their desks have been set up, as though
to make their new juridical status visible: where there once was a fidgety crowd
of small children that were difficult to tell apart from each other, there is now
a grid – in the sense this word takes in physics – the coordinates of which are
formed by rows of distinct yet identical squares. This Cartesian pattern makes it
possible to identify and perceive individuals as fixed points on a grid. This gives
material reality to the hypothesis that there is a homogeneous plane, which allows
us to use the same units to evaluate different elements which have been defined a
priori according to the same parameters. Assigning the children to their desks is
a powerful, if basic, way to track them. More democratic attempts to lay out the
desks in a circle, or in a square, have not managed to do away with this grid-like
effect: they have merely altered its system of coordinates. The power of such grids
becomes clear as soon as we try to dispel them, by asking the children to form
groups again, or to stand up so they can hop or sing, or to move around in order
to do this or that exercise. As soon as they are back in a crowd, they escape their
coordinates. Reverting back to its own topology, this crowd faces the teacher with
a united front, defeating his attempts to penetrate or classify its elements: it makes
a racket.
The Piano Divide …
The piano stands astride the room. It is a mediator: it creates a bridge between
different orders of reality. On the one hand, the keyboard is a visible object, which
is turned towards the children. Made of ivory and ebony – noble materials – its
keys seem identical to the eye, but silently signal to the children that they have
organised sound into a discreet and periodic order, and that it is up to them to
recognise it. On the other hand, an invisible order of reality lies concealed inside
the piano’s lacquered frame: this is the sonorous material universe of copper and
wood, which the keyboard brings to life by activating the hammer.
The piano’s three-dimensional and predefined sketch of the musical score
mediates between the reading subject and the sonorous object – between the
realms of the visual and the auditory. It is a perfect instrument, and not just for
solfège. It materialises the difficult relationship between signs and musical sounds
that solfège handles. It physically outlines the Saussurian divide between musical
signifiers and signifieds. The whole point of musical dictation is to teach children
to retrace and invert the passage leading from the keyboard to the hammer. They
must learn to relate the chaos of nameless sounds emitted by the piano’s blind,
resounding, body, back to the silent, visual order of musical notation which
regulates these sounds. Even if its place here is to produce sounds, the black and
white pattern sketched out by the keyboard also belongs to the linear universe of
writing. Later, when they come to write down the stave in their notebooks, the
children will be adding little more than regulated beats to the musical parameters
which the keyboard already transcribes, so to speak. The piano is a stave projected
onto matter, just as much as it is a music box – i.e. a material container which
emits sounds for anyone who wants to capture them.
A Swivelling Teacher
Finally, there is the teacher, standing between the children and the piano. The
teacher too is a typical mediator: his role is to swivel on his piano stool. He
watches the children while playing the music, which he knows and brings to life,
while also watching the music along with the children when he turns towards the
keyboard. Sometimes he conceals the notes by positioning his body between the
keys and the prying eyes of cheats: creating a screen between the order of written
music and the order of music as sound, he stops the children from seeing what
lies behind him in order to encourage them to use their ears, and learn to connect
written notes to the sounds they make on their own. Sometimes, on the contrary,
he takes down all the screens that lie between written notes and the sounds they
make, superimposing these perfectly in order to show the children how obvious it
all is:3 how clearly the sinuously ascending and descending sounds which tumble
out from behind the piano echo the movements of the hands on the keyboard and
the pattern of the notes on paper. He gives the children the answer, collapsing the
distance that lies between the different senses.
Well-ordered desks, a dividing instrument, a swivelling teacher: this is a
beautifully simple and economical set up, all told, if the classes do eventually
produce musical subjects recognising musical objects. However, so far we have
examined only the layout of the classroom. This layout expresses the intention that
lies behind it: it presents us with a clear and precise sketch of the interconnections
which it establishes between ears and sounds. Its plan for the layout of the pupils
is merely a prediction. It remains to be seen how flesh and blood children will act
out the roles which the layout of the classroom allocates to them, as though it were
a musical score especially written for them.
Initially, it seems that there might be many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip. The
layout of the desks sets the children in order, but this order is arbitrary and has no
meaning for them. This order is also quickly challenged by the infinitely diverse
and inventive ways which they find to interchange their different personalities.
They soon dissolve their distinctive attributes in the warm bath of their small
crowd, while emphasising what brings them together – they crack jokes, make
a racket, send their giggles echoing round the room, and all these noises of
their bodies and voices seem totally impervious to calls to reason, and scarcely
more responsive to threats of punishment. They obstinately refuse to follow
their teacher’s injunctions: by making noise, they not only reject silence, they
also – more importantly – reject his authoritative and organised language. They
find many small ways to discredit their teacher, while seeking the approval of their
classmates with a sidelong glance.
The Small Crowd
Our valiant teacher is up against the physical presence of a crowd: he assesses it

when he tries to isolate its different elements, in an instinctive attempt to divide the
group. Randomly addressing this or that pupil, he looks at him straight in the eye,
hoping that their face to face exchange will help him to redress a balance of power
which was tipping in the pupils’ favour. However, he usually fails to achieve such
a level of contact, unless he resorts to measures which are out of proportion with
his brief: the pupil stares back at him with blank, expressionless eyes. The child
that he arbitrarily singled out looks at him with feigned submission, although it
3
The words used all pertain to the visual, of course: what is obvious is not what can
be heard but what is plain to see. Even before thinking about the realm of written music,
we must always remember to focus on the visual material formats and practical operations
of music, such as keyboards, or the necks of string instruments, which are a sort of musical
pre-notation (cf. Vibrations no. 2, 1985, ‘À la recherche de l’instrument’).
isn’t long before he can no more contain a fit of giggles, which releases him
from the teacher’s clutches and allows him to merge back into the crowd.
The one-to-one encounter which the teacher strives for cannot exist, because
the child he tried to pick out from the group only has eyes for them. The
sniggering attention the other children pay to him is all the child cares about.
Never mind, the teacher must move on, pretending all is well, and start
teaching. That is, he must present the students with an exercise. There is nothing
as instructive as watching the odd mixture of powerlessness and efficiency
which an exercise reveals: nothing can happen until it ‘gels’ and captures the
children’s attention. Without this, it is nothing. The smartest teaching tricks
and the best laid plans bounce off the smooth collective surface of the over-
excited group, and fall as flat as the dullest numbers in old-fashioned solfège
methods. The child that solfège handbooks postulate or presuppose is open and
creative, and well-placed images easily awaken his enthusiasm, refocusing
his mind on the task ahead. He is capable of the most astounding progress.
However, this child, who is always described in the singular, is definitely not
to be found in the classroom. In the place of this child, there are children in
the plural: a herd of children. Indeed, they do behave like a flock of sheep, or
like lemmings, however much we admonish them. It is not a coincidence if we
resort to such animal metaphors: they evoke the way the children’s threshold of
individuality declines as their collective resistance to their teacher increases.
They are literally ‘stubborn as mules’: they ignore the stimuli offered to their
intelligence by the exercises they are set, the tricks in the games they are asked
to play, and the seductive pleasures of competition. Indeed, the irresponsible
little brats remain completely impervious to these scenarios: they are not the
child these strategies had in mind.
That responsible subject, who is supposed to be capable of perceiving
differences, cannot answer the question that he is set because he does not exist
any more than there exists a complex object which he must learn to disentangle
and which is literally ‘set’ in front of him like a question. In this situation, the
children and the sounds which they hear are both indifferent to each other.
They’re all the same: the children cannot distinguish between the notes played
on the piano or between the exercises they are set, any more than the frustrated
teacher can distinguish between his misbehaving pupils.
The topology of this group of children is clear. Indeed, the group itself seeks
to simplify it as much as possible. Inside this group, we find identical elements
whose collective identity is based on random binary relationships which are
equivalent to each other. There is a clear boundary line between what lies inside
and outside the group. Outside the group, we find non-differentiated elements
which produce indifference. They are perceived, used and uniformly discredited
by the group, whose collective reaction is to use them as foils to reconstitute
their own unity. In other words, the only actively valued, pertinent, distinction
is the difference between what lies inside and outside the group: in contrast,
everything that is located within each one of these two zones is subjected to an
intense effort of indifferentiation.
Piano
Teacher
?
Figure 7.2 Time 1, An indifferent class: What does he want?
The teacher is miles away from the idyllic reforms that textbooks propose,
from the miraculous methods which turn music into child’s play, and from the
peaceful routine that it will become possible for him to establish later on, when
everyone knows his place. All the teacher can do for now is observe that he
is up against a characteristically symmetrical process of levelling down. On
the one hand, this levelling affects the children, who are all getting equally
silly. On the other hand, this levelling affects the exercises the teacher sets
them: the power of the group is enough to make everything that comes from
outside it seem indifferent and non-differentiated – everything the teacher says
is equivalent: it is always a pretext for playing him up and making the others
laugh. The group’s invisible protective shell is reinforced by its treatment of
what comes from the outside.
Piano
Teacher
?
Figure 7.3 Time 2, A heckling class: We’d rather laugh together!
Every young teacher is familiar with this situation, which often makes him
lose heart. This pedagogical predicament is so basic that this is probably why it is
so systematically denied, particularly in the child-based discourse. As opposed to
children in the plural, the child in the singular is presented as an unsullied vector of
enchantment. This is why the teacher sometimes makes a slightly hysterical show of
good spirits to try and overcome this initial situation of indifference without having to
name it: a good pedagogue will mobilise his troops without drawing their attention to
what he is doing, breaking down their passive resistance. The best way to defeat this
resistance is to ignore it and count on the infectious impulse generated by good spirits.
Arousing Interest in the Face of Indifference
The teacher has to gamble that indifference is actually an unstable condition,

and that the group’s state of collective indifference is precisely what produces
its apparently impregnable homogeneity. Although for the moment shaking
the children out of their indifference seems impossible to our poor teacher,
retrospectively, it will seem as though this was a safe bet. The children’s wilful
decision to fuse together and focus on themselves masks their many differences,
but does not obliterate them. As soon as these differences start to come into play,
their teacher will be let off the hook. The very exercises which used to bounce off
the closely bonded surface of their group, being radically powerless to provoke any
level of interest in them, will on the contrary become invested by something that is
much larger than them, as the children start to want to evaluate just how different
they are from each other. ‘Me, me!’: the leaders of the resistance are now fighting
to answer their teacher’s questions. With this reversal in the dynamic within the
classroom, instruction suddenly becomes possible and the teacher can now lead
the children. This is a delicate moment. Taking advantage of the same mimetic
drive, he skilfully alters the group’s geophysics and its monolithic resistance gives
way to the frenzied behaviour of magnetised iron filings.
This is the reason why often-repeated assertions about the limited importance
of pedagogical methods compared with the quality of the teacher himself need
to be not only taken seriously, but correctly interpreted. To say that ‘there are
no good or bad teaching methods, only good or bad teachers’ is to recognise
that without the initial reversal of the classroom dynamic it is impossible for a
teaching method to be effective. At the moment when this reversal happens, the
teacher stands completely on his own. He is very aware that he alone is responsible
for the various personal ‘tricks’ to which he resorts, depending on his skills and
personality, in order to start to catch the children’s attention. Not only are official
pedagogical methodologies no help to him at this precise moment, but he knows
that he is fighting both for and against them as he penetrates the unchartered waters
which these methodologies do not bother to plumb, since they target only the ideal
child who has already been won over to their cause.
The word ‘indifference’ aptly describes this perceived lack of difference
between people and things. The two meanings of this term perfectly express the
reversal of the classroom dynamic which makes teaching possible: the teacher
must defeat the children’s indifference by making them recognise differences
between sounds. But how can he get a first result? How is it possible to arouse
interest in the face of indifference?
At this point, the teacher blesses the few fragile devices which he can count
on in this moment of adversity: the layout of the tables, the piano and the caress
of the sounds themselves, his methods and exercises, his own body and capacity
for seduction. Thanks to all of these screens, he does not have to create from
scratch an immediate relationship between the children and the music. In order
to foster the children’s interest, he must interest – i.e. position himself in between
the children and the music. He must be arresting and capture their attention.
Alternatively, he can also – for example – jolt the ears of the children who refuse
to listen to him, their teacher, by allowing a strange, new, sound to take his place.
He plays his first notes, only two or three at a time initially, simply asking the
children to tell him which is higher or lower.
A solfège lesson is invariably an inquisition: ‘what can you hear of the sounds
of front of you, children?’ Before the teacher’s question is reclaimed by the swamps
of indifference in which the group makes a point of engulfing any request from the
outside world, it creates a screen between them, for an instant, because the sounds
through which it passes are themselves both external to the teacher and foreign
to the group’s simplified perceptions. The children prick up their ears: ‘yes, good
question, which is the highest?’ This flickering moment of attention soon gives
way to the group’s preferred stance of self-absorption. However, this brief moment
was enough to signal the decisive importance of an arresting object. The capacity
that this object (three notes, an instrument, an exercise) has to catch the children’s
attention is exactly proportionate to its opacity: that is, to its resistance to the
simplistic interpretation which the group wants to give it, out of a desire to pass
through it and reduce it to the immediate duality of what lies inside and what
lies outside. An object that is opaque is interesting because it cannot easily be
penetrated. This object intrigues the children because it does not allow them to
reduce it to an empty signal which they may indefinitely send back to the person
who emitted it. Such minute breaches of the group’s protective shell are what will
eventually splinter it, as opposed to frontal attacks: authoritarian or demagogical
offensives only reinforce this shell, because they are soon recognised and exposed
for what that they are.
Our skilful teacher uses all available means to provoke the gleam of interest
which will allow the attention the children pay to differences between sounds to
reinstate their differences from each other. There is no responsible subject in the
question ‘What can you hear?’ The ‘you’ which is being addressed has no ear.
What the children hear must be broken down into the series of what each one can
hear: ‘And what about you, there, is that what you heard?’ In order to splinter their
group, the teacher may show a preference for this or that child. He may pretend to
get something wrong, thus inviting pupils to swap places with him. Alternatively,
he may emphasise the merits of another child, and pretend not to care about the
other children’s indifference, allowing his sudden lack of interest in them to pique
their curiosity. He has to divide them, in the knowledge that the group will engage
with his question only if it can penetrate the group and bounce around from child
to child.
Is Psychology for Beginners?
What is going on? Why did I have to adopt this tone in order to describe what
happens in the classroom? Is it because analytical categories change according to
the level of the pupils? Must we make music with the older children, and submit the
teachers to a pedagogical analysis and the parents to a sociological investigation?
And do we always necessarily have to resort to psychology when it comes to
training beginners? This would amount to misreading my argument. At this stage,
psychology has not come into the debate any more than music has, or indeed
sociology, since these disciplines all draw on sets of accepted differences. For the
moment, we are struggling with the unstable topology of a group which has not
yet constituted itself into a class. We are ethnographers, having merely observed
that what first makes it possible to arouse the children’s ‘interest’ is ‘seduction’ –
both words in fact have similar etymological significations: to seduce someone is
to lead them astray, to place an obstacle in their way, to interpose oneself – i.e. to
interest. Referring to this seduction by name makes it easy to recognise it at work

in other areas of pedagogy.
A psychologistic account of the children’s seduction would misunderstand
its cause. Such an explanation would make the person of the teacher entirely
responsible for this seduction. Not only would this be giving rather dubious
overtones to his charisma, but it would not explain why he was so powerless to
arouse the children’s interest just a moment ago. Such an account would also forget
the other screens – objects, relationships, exercises – that have been established
between the children and music. In fact, it would be more accurate to consider the
situation the other way around. At first, the children considered the teacher himself
to be no more than an object among others: to them, he was merely another one of
the things that arrested their attention. The best way to describe his role would be
to say that he is quite simply the greatest screen placed in front of the complacently
self-centred group of children in order to reflect their differences back to them.
At this stage, the teacher’s forced reliance on his personal capacity for
seduction reveals how little stock the children put into musical objects. Although
the power of his gaze, the charm of his voice, his strategic exhibitions of maternal
or fraternal affection, and his imitation of paternal authority, are not very effective,
they nevertheless work better than directly summoning the children to listen to
the music. However, far from inviting the teacher to replace music with direct
seduction4 (whether this may be ‘in a good cause’ or in order ‘to transmit’ the love
of music to them), such attempts at establishing a relationship with the children
are all the more efficient the more indirect they are and the more they are based
on objects. Penetrating the group’s protective shell and breaking it down into
competing subjects demands as much guile as the Greeks exhibited when they
reached the walls of Troy: the teacher must efface himself behind the mysterious
gifts which have been left outside the closed doors of the city.
All the teachers who find themselves thrown into the arena of the classroom
come up with the same basic tricks when they discover that they can’t remember any
of the good advice they received from pedagogues, largely because this advice takes
for granted a situation which they must in fact first create. Drawing up the long list of
these tricks is rather like writing a shopping list of the intermediaries of music before
going to look for them at the market. This heterogeneous list represents everything
that will become transparent once music has established its empire over all of its
subjects, but which for now seems opaque to the children and gives the teacher an
opportunity to intrigue them. Let us enumerate the items on this list.
Firstly, sound itself is opaque: ‘what a funny sound’, ‘what a long vibration’,
‘what a high-pitched sound’, ‘what a low pitched one’, etc. Secondly, the instrument
is even more opaque: this wooden hobby horse is the slightly forbidden, enormous
4
And therefore far from allowing the observer to switch disciplines and move into
the field of psychology.
and fragile5 super-toy of the adults. It is the first thing to provoke the desire for
music: the children want to touch it,6 they wonder what happens when they do this,
or that. They can tell that its mechanism is beautifully complex. Thirdly, musical
exercises are also opaque: these technical drills use children’s games, wordplay,
gestures and group psychology to stimulate and constantly nurture the children’s
interest, focusing their attention on what lies between them and music, as the word
‘interest’ implies. Fourthly, the feelings of the children for their models and rivals
are unstable and no less opaque: although the crowd dynamic which is at work in
the group of children has provisionally suspended the power of these ideal alter-
egos, diluting their power among its members, these ideals are nevertheless always
ready to instantaneously repopulate the child’s world with their mediators. These
mediators can be distant from the child, exhibiting his fascination for everything
that evokes and displaces his parents’ authority, from his desire for approval to
the jealousy of the older children who reject him. Or these mediators can be very
close to him, from his playful competition with and emulation of his friends, to his
reassuring contempt for younger children. The power of seduction is such that it
can easily alter these fundamentally ambivalent relationships, turning the child’s
disappointed sense of being kept at arm’s length into avid conformism.
Finally, the children of course focus on the opacity of their teacher’s body, which
is more mobile than the other mediators, and is capable of organising them and of
drawing attention to each one of them in turn. His body has a ‘presence’, in the same
way that actors do, precisely because they are impersonating someone who is absent.
The teacher must incarnate the music, in the most physical and least metaphorical
sense of the term. He sports a moustache and a funny hat. He has a few rather
obvious rituals. The children like to ridicule his nervous habits. He always tells the
same jokes. He ostensibly casts the children in the parts they will be playing – dunce,
teacher’s pet, scapegoat, etc. A good teacher doesn’t need to call for attention in order
to get it: when his pupils reel off the long list of his idiosyncrasies with a snigger,
they are merely tracing a negative and ironical version of these strategies to arouse
their interest. What is the meaning of the stories they tell about him? What these
stories tell us is that he has broken through the walls, using the presents he showed
the children as a Trojan horse: from now on, the group’s internal relationships will
pass through him. He can now start to teach.
5
One plays the piano, but one does not play with it: ‘Not so loudly’, ‘Be careful’,
‘Not like that ….’
6
Of course, this attraction helps piano teachers more than it does solfège teachers.
Nevertheless, the piano retains its mysterious aura, and continues to incarnate musical
knowledge for everyone, even – indeed especially – for non-pianists. Its harmonic capacity
is often invoked to account for this. However, this is another way of speaking of its
keyboard’s capacity for mediation: like the stave, it materially visualises the notes.
Piano
A

Teacher
Figure 7.4 Time 3, An inter-ested class: Mediators have entered the place …
This changes everything. Mediators that resist the children and are not
commensurate with each other are now popping up within the group: notes, the
piano and the teacher himself. Soon, there will also be percussion instruments,
notebooks, flutes, amusing flash cards – i.e. what teachers rightly call their
‘material’. The same force which once expelled the objects of music from
the group now avidly draws them in. If the teacher can enter into this game,
relationships will stop being binary, interchangeable and actively reluctant to
differentiate between individuals: instead they will become triangular, personal
and powerfully selective. In order to express his desire to be noticed by the
teacher without betraying himself, the child must find substitute objects that
function indirectly. What does the child have at his disposal? Music, of course:
or rather, its classroom representatives – the scraps of notes, instruments,
exercises, and questions which make up the classroom’s background. Children
now propose to answer and accept these props or substitutes. Instead of
considering it directly, the musical question can be refracted by the opacity
of objects
Teacher
Ob
Figure 7.5 Bouncing back against the envelope …
which echoes the divisions between the children who take over from this indirect
question by bouncing it off each other:
Teacher
Ob
Figure 7.6 … or entering it
In other words, the best mediator will be as close as possible to the child and
will be an insider of the group: it will be the other child. If I emphasised the role of
the teacher a few lines previously, it was because he is the most visible mediator
of music: he is responsible for its crystallisation. However, the teacher is probably
not the most active mediator of music, in the chemical sense of the term. The
children will only be able to fully hear the question ‘What can you hear?’ once
they can relate it personally to their alter-egos. This moment, which won’t be long
now, leads to the primal scene of solfège: musical dictation,7 in which a teacher
turns his back on his pupils as unknown notes wing their way between the rows
of children, constraining them to find their bearings in this musical storm, one ear
7
By this I mean that for many musicians, musical dictation operates as the screen
onto which they project their memories of their musical training. Mental representations of
musical dictation underpin most of what musicians have to say about solfège, especially in
France where solfège is central to musical training and to critiques of the assumptions on
which this training is based. If I wanted to introduce my analysis from another perspective,
I could say that in my approach, I consider the scene of musical dictation to be the end point
of my discussion rather than its starting point.
cocked at the piano and one eye on their neighbours. Although the teacher pretends
to be on the lookout for any signs of the inevitable cheating, his fight against this
eternal problem is in fact very pleasant compared with the indifference he had to
combat earlier on – when copying off his neighbour was far from anyone’s mind.
All the teacher’s exercises may be considered in the same way that I have just
presented musical dictation, inasmuch as their efficiency at directly transmitting
music matters less than their capacity to find roundabout ways to attract the
children’s attention, distracting the children from the ultimate objective. Thus, the
children are encouraged to leapfrog over notes, race each other, repeat words or
phrases, answer riddles, crawl through tunnels, do musical gymnastics, etc., which
reveals a significant paradox: the sole preoccupation of same modern reformers of
musical training who criticised solfège for being cut off from music, seems to have
been to cut music loose as soon as they explicitly started putting teaching theory
into practice – i.e. taking into account the need to make children interested in music,
which traditional solfège supposedly failed to do. As they immediately guessed,
arousing this interest meant finding ways to disguise the connection between the
exercises which they devised and their over-obvious musical objective. They
achieved this by systematically erecting a screen between the children and that
goal through a language borrowed from other areas of life, as well as through
games, bodily practices, and the possibilities presented by the group. All of these
techniques invite children not so much to look up and focus on them as such, but
rather to observe each other and compare each other through them, which allows
them to literally measure themselves against each other.
A Structural Change: From a Crowd to a Class
The children do not immediately start to focus on the object of the lesson – i.e.
music – once their initial state of generalised indifference has been overcome. This
focus is achieved progressively, step by step, in successive layers which become
increasingly musical as the teacher can start to take it for granted that each new
stage of the work he covers in helping the children become interested in music
builds on the layers of those which came before, adding to the number of objects
they are exposed to. During this process, some of the children have trained their
ear to recognise the notes, their memory to remember their sequence, and their
hand to write them on the stave. They have also learned to establish note values
within bars, on paper, and in their heads. These mysterious intermediaries do not
faithfully reflect the music. These oblique, selective, iridescent refractions both
arrest and allow reflection, highlighting the differences between the children. The
treachery of these objects finds an echo in the betrayal of the subjects: the rows
of children who once stood up for each other and presented a united front to the
teacher are now examining each other ferociously, ready to draw attention to each
other’s ‘mistakes’ with cruel collective jibes. The same force which used to keep
the crowd of children closed in on itself has become the most powerful vector
of its ‘classification’, as it were. Traduttore traditore: turning the children into

musical beings is a continuous process of translation, which both betrays them
and transports them into music. The betrayal of the objects which the group used
in order to reconstitute its collective image is fertile, since these objects have
fragmented its image, and refracted it in thousands of unevenly penetrating shards.
The teacher has won his gamble as soon as the group of pupils stops automatically
and spontaneously presenting itself as a crowd constituted in opposition to him,
allowing this notion to slip into the background behind the internal dynamics of the
children’s attempts to establish their differences from each other. Music can now
establish its selective empire over them: it divides them in order to rule over them. A
decisive stage has been reached when the child hesitates, weighing the comparative
benefits of different answers, as the teacher presents him with a complex variant of
the initial exercise he set him, when he asked the child to name the three notes he
had just played. The child’s calculation is very simple: either he answers the question
and looks as though he is ‘sucking up’ to the teacher, or he doesn’t know the answer
and looks like a clot now that flattering wolf-whistles greet those who can ‘get it
right’ the first time around. He is now busy trying to outperform his friends and has
achieved a clearer sense of what he is working towards. He wants to score points and
thinks about the examinations he has to sit. He is also aware of sanctions: he therefore
bears in mind that there is a price to pay for misbehaving, mitigating the benefits of
seeing his charisma soar in the eyes of the group. Scheming and ranking himself in
the group, he has now become a subject. All he needs is to be fed objects, so that his
individual differences have something to accentuate them. And suddenly, as a result
of the same process there is now an object, appearing before him: it looks increasingly
recognisable, even familiar, because it is the sum of its features which the subject has
learnt to perceive and reproduce clearly. Soon enough, as the relationships which
made music appear to him disappear, it will become increasingly easy for him to
name that object as music itself.
The shell has now been punctured and the children are now literally ‘open’
to the music, as teachers sometimes say, significantly (and with relief) when at
last their pupils start to pay attention. In Figure 7.4, the relationships within the
classroom were presented as binary. In contrast, although there are still a few
pockets of resistance to the teacher, these have become more individual. For
example, we now have two friends who are only interested in their duo. Far from
this allowing them to blend into the group, this is enough to distinguish them from
the others. A new factor is at play: changing everything and mediating everything
else, music is now what provides a measure for their behaviour. The relationships
which music fosters are complex, multiple, indirect and irreducible to each other.
Some of these relationships are founded on rivalry: the children may target a
specific classmate by trying to provide better answers to the questions the teacher
sets them in his exercises. A greater number of other relationships centre on the
teacher, who can now easily lay claim to the position of a privileged role-model:
the children pull out all the stops to try and attract his attention. Other children
focus on a particular object – an instrument, or musical dictation, for example –
where they have discovered that they have an edge over the others. Others still are
now able to locate their music class in a larger universe, and see that it is itself one
means to an end among others.
Unequal Perspectives
The perspectives opened up by the apparition of the object are not all of the same
depth, as the screens which mediate the music are more or less transparent. This is
what the arrows in Figure 7.7 try to represent. In some cases, these perspectives may
stop short of reaching the music: focusing on this or that intermediary – the teacher,
the instrument, a privileged mediator, such as a parent or a friend – thereby reducing
music to the status of a means towards this intermediary. In other cases, these
perspectives may focus on music, as the layout of the classroom dictates. However,
the music then starts to seem increasingly beyond the reach of the pupils as these
perspectives turn it into the pupils’ ultimate objective, dwarfing its current – present
but imperfect – representatives. The musical focus of these perspectives downgrades
the status of the representatives of music, giving them the instrumental status of
intermediary objectives. The children are set series of increasingly complex and
copious exercises, and their numbered notebooks chart their progress. The children
learn a new rhythm or voice every time they reach a new stage, and are set pieces
juxtaposing together elements which previous exercises dissociated from each other,
spurred on by the promise that making progress will lead them to music.
Piano
Teacher
Figure 7.7 Time 4, A crystallised class: Music is appearing …

Finally, in other cases still, the arrows in Figure 7.7 can sometimes reach
‘beyond’ music, overstepping the only explicit objective of musical education.
Passing through music, these arrows turn it into a vector for other relationships
and music becomes one of the buttresses which the child uses in order to construct
his own personality. Whereas a moment ago, a spirit of reassuringly mindless
unanimity ruled over the class, the various strategies and calculations proliferating
around the child suddenly single him out: the child can no longer count on the
group’s collective identity. The time has come for him to fall quickly back onto the
mediators through whom he usually defines himself: his parents, his brothers, his
friends, celebrities even. Whether they are positive or negative, formal or informal,
personal or collective, these role models and rivals are all those for whom, with
whom, as well as against whom, he ‘makes music’: among other things, they will
pass judgement over him, depending on what he does with music.
Their gaze also has another consequence: it places music back at the centre of
the set of activities through which the personal and social identities of children
develop, allowing them – and us, at the same time – to leave the cocoon of the
classroom. Music falls back into place, and helps the children to sort themselves
out. ‘I listen to my teacher in school, and to you here.’ ‘Do you know your letters
yet? Can you read notes?’ ‘My son does judo and music.’ ‘I am good at everything
in school, it’s the same with music.’ ‘I don’t like school, but it’s not me that’s
failing: look at how good I am when I’m interested ….’
Etc. Let us acknowledge the rich diversity of individual predicaments. In
particular, let us acknowledge the ocean of adolescent musical interests – with their
other forms of music, media and practices – which generally will soon submerge
the small island of early childhood music education, in the case of those children
who have attended such classes. Very soon, observation will call attention to the
differences of each child, making it difficult to make sweeping generalisations,
and making it impossible to evoke an imaginary child as though he could stand for
them all. Even within the universe of music education, I do not seek to reduce to a
single classifying mechanism what happens every day in thousands of classrooms,
when I attempt to give proper analytical weight to the local accumulation of minute
mechanisms of differentiation which music teaching involves. The child, whose
increasingly personalised and socialised identity is being constructed on the ruins
of forgotten misdemeanours, constitutes a new object of research, and as such
requires to be grasped with new intellectual tools, and even perhaps described with
a new style of writing.
Having started with an indifferent and non-differentiated group of children, we
are about to find ourselves overwhelmed by their differences. These differences are
personal, first of all.8 ‘I am good.’ ‘That seems to work.’ ‘They say I’m musical.’
‘When I do that people pay me compliments – I know I’m a musician. It’s an asset
8
Despite their often justified reputation for denying that there is such a thing as talent,
sociologists are under no obligation to do this. However, they refuse to accept the invitation
which this word always implies not to investigate this phenomenon any further. Going
when I play.’ The mechanics of this self-realisation are all the more powerful for
being reciprocal: ‘the fact that I am a musician proves that I am good; this pushes
me to do the exercises I am set, I try to answer the questions I am asked, I work
hard, I show interest – and in the process, I become a musician.’
There are also social differences at work, of course. It is a case of: ‘Tell me
where you come from, and I will tell you who you are….’ Granting all their
importance to the mediations which make it possible for differences to take shape
does not imply denying these differences: on the contrary, this implies constructing
the process that explains how they operate. We will not be disappointed, from this
point of view. But before turning to the incredibly diverse population we find
in music schools,9 it is important to recognise that slapdash sociologists who
invoke genealogy and heredity in order to ascribe to the world of illusion the
ideological veil that actors weave over the real causes of their movements are
as incapable as these actors of explaining anything: the a priori decision to turn
society into a cause makes it impossible to understand how it is that it can indeed
act. I have lingered over my ethnographical analysis of a music class in order to try
to show the opposite: that is, in order to show how being taught in a class setting
gradually transforms the class itself, making causes act on a group which was a
priori indifferent to these causes. Understanding how children come to become
what they will become, means that teaching, together with the internal changes
this effects on the child, is the operation which produces a society: that is, the
operation that turns an inert and ill-determined set of virtual differences into a
structured system of causal determinations. The sounds work on the children in
this way while the children work at the sounds.
This is the reason why I have laid so much emphasis on the initial change in
the classroom dynamic on which the pedagogical process depends, at the risk of
endowing this change with a rather mythical status, even though it is undoubtedly
less focused and more gradual in real life classrooms, where it is not that easy
to isolate. This crystallisation is the reason why we are under the illusion that a
minute cause has had an enormous impact: after we noticed the flaw that a micro-
difference between the children left in the once smooth surface of the group, all
of their differences were sucked in and reshuffled and then suddenly thrown into
relief, making the landscape of the classroom appear composed of an endless
series of contrasts. Teaching music to children involves managing the rough edges
of the notes, and also those of the kids: it encourages us to seek differences in both.
When the time comes to launch the mechanics that create face to face encounters
between subjects and objects, the well-meaning democratic ideals that inspired us
beyond the definitive explanation which ‘talent’ suggests, they choose instead to examine
what talent produces and what it is produced by (cf. Hennion 1997a).
9
Cf. Hennion et al. (1983), op. cit. It is worth remarking that whereas there are
many investigations of social differences in schools, there are only a few studies of these
differences in music schools.
are left behind: our machine needs differences in order to function, and its operating
system is to establish classifications.
As is often the case with projects seeking to reform music teaching, active
teaching methods can sometimes present striking examples of the return of the
repressed. In one exercise,10 young children start by standing in line at the back of
the classroom, each one of them representing a note on the piano: they only step
forward when ‘their’ note is played, and return to the back of the classroom if they
make a mistake. There could hardly be a better way of describing the fact that just as
the children classify the notes, the notes also classify the children. At the start of their
march towards music, the children in the group are all equal and there is nothing
to distinguish them from each other. As the notes start to emerge from an initially
non-differentiated mass of sounds, the distinctions that are progressively established
between them transform an originally homogeneous group into a set of more or less
musical children, because they are variously able to get to grips with the musical
objects and recognise its features. It is now music that is calling the tune.
Figure 7.8 The children’s musical stave
Pedagogues never know exactly where they stand relatively to psychologists:

this is not surprising, since their outlooks are mutually exclusive. Pedagogy strives
to tear children away from the universe of psychology to make them enter the
world of music. The pedagogical perspective treats music as the single cause of
the child’s musical education, as the whole process of learning music becomes
increasingly dominated by the sole logic of the musical object, as opposed to the
10
This exercise is inspired by the Martenot method of music education.
child’s relationships with his teacher, friends and parents. ‘He is very musical’:
when pedagogy succeeds, there is no more need to speak of the child, his parents
and teacher, and it becomes pointless to evaluate the child’s deepest desires,
to weigh up the importance of social determinism, and to poke around in the
classroom, since there is nothing to see there.11 Now, only one thing matters: to be
qualified as a musician.
Making Music into its Own Cause
Having attended a music class without assuming that I would find musicians
or music, what did I discover in the end? Where did my straightforward initial
hypothesis lead me? Let me recall this hypothesis: I wanted to avoid an a posteriori
explanation of what happens in the classroom. Instead of evaluating this in the
light of the realities which it produces, I wanted on the contrary to show how
the classroom rises from the ruins of its own reality as a space, establishing the
more general causes in the name of which it will be assessed: the symmetrical and
reciprocal recognition of the music of sounds and the musicality of children.
Paying attention to the modalities of the apparition of these primary causes, I
refused simply to relate back to them the facts that I observed; conversely, I also
refused to substitute my own superior causes to the causes invoked by the actors.
This meant that all I found were mediating children who were unsure of how
they related to each other and were separated and reunited by the introduction
of other mediators within their group. In this perspective, there was a pleasing
abundance of mediators: there were sounds, rows of tables, a teacher, exercises,
neighbours, games, examinations, music books and instruments. In turn, these
models and tools gradually revealed the landmarks of a semi-sonorous and semi-
written world of pitches, chords, rhythms and timbres. At first this musical space
itself was the target allocated to the children, while they were learning to recognise
its sounds. However, it wasn’t long before this space itself became the focus of
something greater. Soon, it was merely the scene in which something essential
unfolded. Once the children’s acquisition of its language allowed them to hear
musical works, music outgrew the space where it had been staged. The temporal
progression of ‘French’ solfège methods can seem ridiculous, and sometimes
even absurdly (as though you had to learn to write before you could speak) rigid
and exclusive (solfège as against music). Nevertheless, there is no method of
teaching music which does not include the same succession of stages: methods
starting from rough, sonorous and visual, gestural and aural, elements, gradually
organising them into imperfect means, which – once they have been mastered –
provide pupils with an outline of the following stage. We have already seen how,
in the solfège class which we analysed, this perspective – which is systematically
11
This is the overwhelming response I got from music school heads whenever I
persisted in asking for renewed permission to visit their institutions.
ignored by the official pundits – genuinely transforms a space that is closed upon
itself by opening it up onto a world that lies outside it (cf. Figure 7.7, p. 237: the
divided classroom). As the accumulation of successive planes starts to give greater
depth to the perspective, its vanishing point becomes clearer. The justification
for this rather long walk lies on the horizon, which is where the contours of its
Promised Land start to appear. All the hard work that solfège demands vanishes
behind the power of a word, to which these different stages in the learning process
themselves add more weight: music.
This quick foray into the means of music makes it possible to give a new
and more accurate account of the stakes of musical pedagogy. I did not turn to
psychology in order to shed light on a local group of children, before letting
pedagogues take over, followed by musicologists and aestheticians once we had
focused on the musical object, only to allow my sociological perspective to finally
re-enter the debate (and try to assert its pre-eminence), when it was time to measure
the stakes and general determinations of music education. This understanding of
the order of things and the distribution of the causes of music education, makes it
impossible to grasp what is at stake in the educational process by blindly trusting
its self-appointed authorities. In this rather authoritarian perspective, the classroom
obeys a set of increasingly general laws: yet, what we have seen, in fact, is that it
generates its own causes. On the contrary, in order to understand what happens in
the classroom, one needs to start from the heterogeneous relationships which the
children develop with things and with people, since this is what gradually gives rise
to a different type of relationship: the musical subject’s relationship to the musical
object. Understanding this dynamic is not a matter of allocating different tasks to
the classroom’s different observers depending on their disciplinary affiliations,
but of acknowledging the transformation of the relationships under observation.
What mediation does is take music and transform it, by turning the psycho-sensory
game that music is for children into an object of knowledge for pedagogues, into
an enabling means of identity for adolescents, into an object of taste for the music
lovers they will become, into a pretext for virtuoso analyses for sociologists, into
a special area of competence for professional musicians, and, beyond all of this –
and most importantly – into a reality which radiates at the heart of a whole world
of practices, which in their turn ceaselessly cause that reality to develop.
At first, there is no music and there are no musicians, but only interchangeable
mediating entities and mediators. In the end, we have music, as well as diversely
talented musical subjects. Between these poles there lies the work that was done to
interest these subjects in music and was forgotten once they came to grips with it,
eclipsed by the properties which this work attributes to the terms on which music
education is based and which it makes seem increasingly intrinsic to music the
more the subjects’ musical training progresses. This reversal of musical causality
rests on an accusation, in the etymological sense – almost as of a defendant in
court – ‘What can you hear?’ This is the result of an initial procedural gambit,
which allows mediators who are caught in an unstable relationship based on
mutual scrutiny to subject themselves to a common cause, allowing them to
evaluate themselves in relation to it This is what allows the opacity of apparently

unmotivated things to be displaced by the clarity of a world ruled by music: this
common cause – music – makes it possible to read, differentiate, and interpret this
world, as it wafts through it.
Individual talent and the acoustic reality of sound will later foster more
complex associations between a good ear and the precision of musical languages,
between the subtleties of subjective taste and aesthetic objectivity, etc. This
provisional complexity compels us to take the detours which are necessary in
order to obtain a full picture of our final goal: music. The deeper our perspective
on music becomes, the purer it starts to appear. Much as the voyage of initiation
which the Magic Flute describes, the absurd series of trials which musical
training involves eventually leads to the light of revelation: once a student’s
musical education is complete, the teacher leaves music and the musician facing
each other alone.
Transition
Music as a Theory of Mediation
The musical apparatus emprisons musical ideas more than we realise it.
P. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 1966, p. 16
Music schools and their students, concert halls and their audiences, orchestras and
their musicians, all focus without doubt on the same thing: music. Music exists: from
the twentieth century, discs and the radio gave further proof of this, as did the media
and their markets, and the music departments of Virgin Megastores and FNAC in
France, not to mention the budget which the French Ministry of Culture allocates
to music. Instruments, musical scores, recordings: all these things make music into
a tangible object, and endow it with the reassuring visibility which statues innately
possess. Musical institutions have turned fleeting, airborne sounds into objects that
can be seen, touched and purchased. This apparition of music is what I focus on in
my work, in order to undo the assumption that music predates institutions, which, as
it were, turn fleeting, airborne sounds into statues. The very success of this grounding
operation is what hides it from our eyes.1
Music sets apart a set of objects and practices in order to organise and inscribe
them with increasing precision into bodies and things, ordering them around a
shared reality which gradually makes their reciprocal inscription irreversible.
Stabilisation, installation, institution, and establishment: these words have the same
etymological root, as does the state, which is the largest of these ‘establishments’.
Inversely proportional to the paucity of the discourses on music, the institutional
richness and density of the musical world is directly related to the evanescence of
sound objects. Whenever music tries to shift its relationship to its audience through
the intercalation of objects, it has to multiply the number of spaces and devices
which can bear witness to its invisible presence.
When it comes to music, the notion of object is a metaphor, to which we
return endlessly. I have nothing to go on if I don’t pass through the innumerable
intermediaries of music: something or someone must always be there to make the
air vibrate. There is no Bach without a disc, or an instrument. There can be no
musical museum or exhibition: music must be re-presented every time. Musical
interpreters like to repeat that music is recreated with each new performance.
1
Words that end with ‘tion’ (or ‘ment’) are performative, in French and in English,
since they operate the very transformation they evoke: starting from action, they soon
indicate its result, as well as the organism that is at work; cf. M. de Certeau, on the word
‘production’: ‘Here as in many other instances (consider ‘manifestation’, ‘apparition’ – and
even ‘action’) a pressure of current language leads meaning to turn from the act to its result,
from the active state of doing to the passive state of being seen’ (1988, note 3 p. 49).
This is also what we learned when we examined the work of the Baroques: a
solfège lesson on its own is not enough to make music flow, in the same way that
listening to musicologists did not allow us to rediscover a past repertoire. Music
will only spring forth when the whole set of musical relationships of a period are
produced anew from the few objects that can allow us to reconstitute them. It is
not just a matter of rectifying a few historical errors, but of rethinking everything:
making music spring forth involves learning its repertoire, defining its style,
manufacturing its instruments, and training a generation of musicians to become
familiar with its pitches, tempos, phrasings and instruments, as well as with its
styles of ornamentation, accentuation and improvisation, while also reconstituting
vanished vocal techniques and ways of holding the bow.
The underside of music’s almost total inability to use objects as its delegates
is the general mobilisation it requires from human beings, which allows it to find
a new audience (and to become a contemporary music) through the very gestures
which redefine it. Music does not need sociology. Music is a sociology. Its audience
must always be reconstituted: it must always be retrained in order to arouse its
interest step by step through the introduction of modifications which impact on
the listeners’ very bodies. Music does not present its audience with finished works,
unlike restored paintings, which can leave modern spectators feeling too remote to
care, because they did not take part in the process which led to the re-apparition of
an early work. In contrast, the successive reinterpretations which past repertoires
have received exemplify this process. Far from catching our attention in order to
substitute themselves for music, as is the case with the plastic object, the objects
of music – notes, scores, discs, instruments and everything else that stabilises it
somewhat – do not merge with it but buttress it, leading the gaze towards an ever-
receding point. There never is any music: the objects that point to it are all there is.
It is as though music had been designed with a theory of mediation in mind.
Chapter 8
‘Bach Today’1
A work will last as long as it can appear to be very different from how its
author intended.
P. Valéry, Tel Quel I, 1941, p. 206
Bach is not the author of the BWV, the catalogue of his collected works.2 Nor did
he ever release an unabridged compilation of his own cantatas. Rather, he was
occupied with composing the music of the present moment, constantly reworking
his own material as well as that of those who preceded him. All the documents
that in our eyes represent the composer’s greatness today – exhaustive catalogues,
collections, compilations and ‘box sets’ of his work – leading us always farther
back toward the sources of Bach’s genius and allowing for a perpetual reaffiliation
of his authenticity, are the modern fruition of the combined efforts of musicologists
and the music industry. It is in the name of this Bach – who thus has become at
once Classical, as the inquiries of musicology into the origins of his work have
shown, and modern, in the way that we now establish the historical and musical
validity of his work – that we scorn the nineteenth century for having incessantly
copied, mutilated and deformed his œuvre in order to make his music sound again.
But this is not what happened. History has been written backwards. Indeed, we
are doubly the children of the nineteenth century: both in our relationship to Bach
and, even more so, in our love for ‘Classical music’. Bach fans in the nineteenth
century did not have access to an official catalogue of the master’s works. It is
not fair that we should look down on them from our musicological pedestal, as if
they had willingly deformed a virtual Bach that they had hardly understood. They
are, on the contrary, the first lovers of Bach who, beginning with the few works
that they knew and admired (and indeed prolifically arranged), transformed our
relationship with each musician from the past. The presence of Bach for us, as a
composer that we can listen to directly, was not natural to nineteenth-century ears.
These admirers snapped up Bach from among the dusty bookshelves filled with
old masters. They took him and transformed him into a contemporary, at first not
as a composer, but as a kind of repository of superior musical laws that each lover
of music would have to learn and apply in his own way. This accounts for all of
the copies, the parodies and works composed ‘in the style of …’. This is how they
rendered Bach audible again, providing him the same level of appreciation with
1
This text was first published in 2001 (Hennion and Fauquet 2001). The case study
comes from research conducted with Joël-Marie Fauquet, a musicologist at the CNRS and
ardent defender of a renewed social history of music (Fauquet and Hennion 2000).
2
Bach Werke Verzeichnis, his works catalogue, W. Schmieder (ed.), Leipzig, 1950.
which they heard the pieces of their own time so that, little by little, Bach came to
represent not only a reference for them, an old master, a monument in the shadow
of which stands the music of the day, but an altogether contemporary composer.
They succeeded so well that they eventually primed the public ear for ‘Classical
music’. But we must understand how late this phenomenon occurs: even as late as
1881, we note a critic’s surprise at the fact that audiences attend concerts ‘where,
nevertheless, only essentially Classical music is played’ (Le Ménestrel, 22/V/1881:
199). The astonishment would be reversed today.
This is what we want to stress: Bach does not join an already made musical
universe; rather, he generates it anew, helps create it piece by piece, through
the invention of a new taste for music. Throughout the century we witness the
formation of both a new way to love music and a new repertoire of masterpieces
that respond to this appreciation. In order to understand how this new love of
serious, demanding, Classical music developed in France – a development that
was primarily based on Beethoven and Bach – we examined the work of Boëly,
Fétis, Alkan, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Chopin, Franck and Liszt. Through the way
that each incorporated the insights that they discovered in Bach’s work into their
own compositions, these composers gradually developed the modern form of our
musical appreciation. Their interaction with Bach’s œuvre also led to the current
stipulation that the past be respected, a stipulation that paradoxically calls for us
to reject this nineteenth century, so as to return to a more original, more authentic,
closer Bach, a Bach who is ‘better’ understood.
Bach’s Grandeur
How can we think Bach’s grandeur?3 How much should we attribute to the
continuous work that has taken hold of him and transformed his work, making
him both the instrument and the object of our love of music? To respond to such
a question, we cannot be content with merely studying the reception of his work,
nor can we undertake a critique of the adoration that he has inspired, inasmuch
as Bach’s music does not cease to change and because, inversely, Bach serves to
redefine all music. This is why, against the grain of a musicology of the Urtext,
one that always tends toward a return to an original Bach, both conceived as and
transformed into a unique source of our appreciation, we have chosen deliberately
to place ourselves in an intermediary position: in a country other than Germany, and
3
The word ‘grandeur’, between worth and greatness, has first to be understood
literally, as the one which, contrasting with Mozart’s ‘grace’ and Beethoven’s ‘strength’ –
or ‘genius’, for both – is constantly used by most commentators (Bach is a giant, a colossus,
a Jupiter). But, although in a less elaborate sense than that developed by Boltanski and
Thevenot (2006), it can also refer to the idea of a physical parameter or a measured quantity:
the yardstick of a certain reality, on which critics and musicians base themselves to defend
a conception of what is good music.
‘Bach Today’ 249
during the period beginning in 1800, when 50 years after Bach’s death his œuvre
begins to be published, and ending in 1885, the bicentennial of the musician’s
birth. By our inquiry, we do not intend to take Bach down from the heights or to
criticise his ‘glorification’, nor do we intend to sing a new hymn to his glory. In
order to understand what Bach’s grandeur means to a music lover today, we will
rather follow the genealogy of this greatness through its formation in nineteenth-
century France. More generally, it is also a question of analysing the immense
current importance of a Classical composer, and of finding ways to account for the
role of his music in what has become an œuvre of reference.
The case of ‘great names’, such as Bach’s in music or Rembrandt’s and van
Gogh’s in painting, is complex. They are already what they are. We cannot rewrite
history in hindsight, forgetting their double nature, as though they were not both
the subjects of history and the objects of our celebration.4 In such a project,
the questions one asks, including the sociologist – what renderings of Bach are
possible, what does he represent, what do we look for through him? – remain
prisoners of our modern relationship to the past. Bach is the Sphinx before whom
the modern listener is challenged. What is the secret behind the father of music’s
enigmatic and sullen face? Aesthetic, historic or social interpretations ‘dealing’
with music in general have superseded interpretations ‘of’ the music itself, yet
they tackle Bach in exactly the same terms: could there be yet another, unexplored
approach to deciphering him differently? By contrast, it is this relationship that
we wish to reveal, rather than exploit by proposing yet another in a long line of
Bach interpretations.
This is the classic problem posed by genius:5 if the history of works and that of
tastes are kept separate, if the opposition is maintained between music itself and
the public that reconstructs it, the problem is insoluble. Either everything comes
from Bach, and we must delve indefinitely into the work and its author in order to
discover the secret: in other words, Bach’s grandeur lies in Bach ‘himself’. Or, it is
we who create Bach, and therefore adopt the critical sociology of this continuous,
retroactive construction of genius: in other words, we are the ones who produce
the authority of great geniuses (Heinich 1997). Here is a very frustrating game that
ends in a draw. It is as though any recognition by a sociologist of the importance of
a work of art signals an avowal of powerlessness and as though, inversely, anything
that might be ascribed to the influence of historic or social factors upon the work
4
One can better understand biography if one views it in terms of the strategies that this
problem forces biographical authors to adopt: to depict the man behind the work, to show that
he is not what we think he is, to clear the bad ones and to blacken the good ones, to criticise
stereotypes and to deconstruct myths (i.e., former biographies). Biases of the biographical
genre have been extensively discussed in history. Curiously this is quite not the case in
musicology, where it is so abundant – but maybe this latter fact explains the former.
5
See Hennion (1997a). The topic has been discussed by a long line of authors,
especially among social critics, since Kris and Kurz (1981) and Zilsel (1993 (1926)); also
see Elias (1994).
seems to detract from it. On the one hand, one has to go further back toward
the source in order to establish the historical reality of what Bach did. One must
work in a more and more documented manner, being ever more precise, through
the accumulation of dates, places, circumstances, contexts, musical analyses,
influences, modes of composition, of writing, of performances, of publication
(and, paradoxically, these modern forms of research, knowledge and appreciation
of Bach do not cease to render him more and more grandiose). On the other hand,
it is merely a question of highlighting, not without a certain condescension, the
reception of this œuvre in its time and the effects that it produced, by following the
twists and turns of a recognition that is always incomplete, overdue, partial – since,
in a very anachronistic way, one judges the work according to the parameters of
one’s own modern understanding.6
The Use of Bach
Our project is to consider the history of appreciation for Bach outside the
problematic of his work’s ‘reception’.7 To speak of reception is to already admit
that the œuvre is constituted. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder: the
formation of a taste cultivated for Classical music is not simply an independent
development that permits the ‘reception’ of the great composer to always be more
worthy of him. On the contrary, we will try to show that there was, and continues
to be, a simultaneous production of a taste for Bach, of an œuvre corresponding
to this taste and, more generally, of a new mechanism for musical appreciation.
Indeed, the hand is not dealt to two partners (Bach and us) but to three (Bach, us
and ‘the music’), none of which can be separated from the others.
Therein lies the very object of our approach. Set apart from the musicological
tradition of inquiries into Bach’s reception, it is equally distanced from those of
social history and sociology of taste. More precisely, it is based on the use of Bach
in nineteenth-century France. Use, and not taste or circulation. The term ‘use’,
6
The precursory work here is Corten’s (1978). He does use here and there a too easy
critique of the nineteenth century’s erring ways (a double anachronism: this means judging
a ‘past’ Bach in the name of another ‘authentic’ one which only our present research has
given us! Those ‘erring ways’ are precisely what made Bach cross the times, and finally
reach us). But on the whole, the more important point is that Corten has been the first to
undertake the ‘respectful’ work we want to pursue: regarding all the real occurrences of
Bach at different moments, and what they have produced.
7
And this is true even if reception analyses, of course, compared to the blindness of
a musicology of the ‘big names’ and the ‘great works’, really bring new insights, as they
consider concretely how works are performed, understood, criticised, how they change
through different times and spaces, the degree to which the abilities of listeners – perceived
as active performers – matter. There is a German journal which deals only with ‘Bach-
Rezeption’. Reception theory has mostly been developed in the case of literature (Iser 1978,
Jauss 1982).
though slightly polemical, best underlines the idea that Bach does not precede his
reputation; that we cannot separate the composer’s works from the modalities of
taste for his work, as if the only variables, in time and space, were the recognition
and appreciation by a diverse audience of a music, itself fixed.8 The term also
emphasises the active and productive character of taste, which cuts up the pieces,
reorganises them, rereads and connects them, extracts new sensations from them,
and makes something else from them while using them to shape itself.9 The use
of Bach continually changes ‘his’ music. Firstly, only a very small portion of this
music was known and played, with different aspects being accentuated each time,
and it was subject to exceedingly varied interpretations. Furthermore, in addition
to the perpetual evolution in the limited catalogue of pieces actually accessible,
known, played or admired, there was a constant development in the sounds,
instruments, tempos, phrases, accents, and even notes indeed, all that allowed for
the definition of the music’s ‘effect’, as it was called in the nineteenth century. But
music is not merely a written score, transformed into an Urtext,10 that becomes
increasingly untouchable as modern knowledge, dominant and self-assured,
becomes the best guarantor of the past’s authenticity, music is what ‘happens’
while playing and listening.
However, finally and above all, the word ‘use’ reinscribes the appreciation
of the work in an overarching framework: Bach ‘serves’ to redefine all music. A
reception-based study of Bach neglects to say this enough. A certain use of Bach
strove towards this transformation of musical taste in a surprisingly explicit way.
It is by concentrating on Bach (and Beethoven before him),11 and by patiently
8
We would better acknowledge precursors among art historians, such as Haskell when
he develops in minute detail his analyses of the variations of taste not taken as proofs of the
arbitrary character of our values but as necessary stages on the historical path followed by
the co-formation of a catalogue of works, of technical devices to display them, and of an
ability to appreciate them (Haskell 1967/80, Haskell and Penny 1982), cf. above, pp. 138ff.
9
History of material culture (Mukerji 1983) and of cultural practices have paved
the way for this process, e.g. on books and reading (Chartier 1987, 1993); on music, see
Weber (1975, 1986) on concerts and classicism as a ‘canon’ and, more recently, Morrow
(1989) on concert in Vienna and Johnson (1995) on ‘listening’ in Paris, in eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and on disc, Maisonneuve (2001). On the ‘amateurs’, see Hennion and
Maisonneuve et al. (2000) and below, ch. 9.
10
With its aura of prestige, Urtext seems to be the primitive version of the work, as
the composer has written it. But far from being an image of an original state, it implies a
supplementary historical work on the conditions of its reading, to reconstitute a use and
understand how people did perform the scores (especially to restore what was not written,
as grace notes, ornaments, inequality or accents). About multiple avatars of Baroque
music scores, travelling between their own time, their Romantic use and our ‘authentic’
rediscovery, see above, Chapter 6.
11
On Beethoven’s and Beethovenians’ capital role in the constitution of a group of
music lovers, see Fauquet (1986) and DeNora (1995). We do not wish to attribute everything
to Bach at the expense of others, such as Beethoven, above all, with Haydn and Mozart;
examining the enlightened lovers of his music, the sensible critics and the
rigorous professors, that a group of professionals – at first a circle that was rather
limited, but who later became the whole set of the self-proclaimed artistic elite –
collectively and rapidly made musical practices evolve towards what we consider
today to be the definition of Classical music: the refined delight of select works,
the selective admiration for the pinnacles of art and the demanding quest for
sublime moments that the practice of music could procure. The precise object
of a socio-historical analysis of taste is the gradual formation of an increasingly
elaborate and sought-after predilection for works that are constituted in historic
repertoires, and more simply, for works from the past (Hennion 1997b). It is not
possible to write the history of music backwards, from the heights of the three
beacons that illuminate it, Bach–Mozart–Beethoven. And more generally, it is
not possible to do so if we consider the establishment of the modern values and
definitions that determine what good or great music is. We have inherited these
criteria from history; they are its product and cannot be its yardstick.12
Why Bach?
For such a study, aimed at not separating Bach from the appreciation of Bach, at
following the co-production of Bach by his history and of his history by his music,
Bach is ideal for many reasons.
To begin, the greatest of creators writes before the model of the creator, of the
original artist. He does not create from nothing: he comments, continues, adorns.
He does not produce an œuvre (and this is no longer true after him, and becomes
completely false after Beethoven, conscious producer of himself as an ingenious
creator, see DeNora, op. cit.), he makes music of the day to express the gospel of
the day. His music is not meant to be replayed as an œuvre (nor does it have any
greater reason not to be, in the sense of being ‘forgotten’ as an œuvre, which would
allow it to be rediscovered): it must simply be constantly reworked, as it often
is during its composition, for others to express themselves anew through music;
music that has already been written is only a way to reproduce new music (you
Handel is very important too, of course, among founding fathers; the membership of some
others, like Gluck, Weber, Rossini or Mendelssohn, to the very select club of the ‘great
Classical masters’ will be much more ephemeral.
12
That is why we find it difficult to make sense of the debate about ‘authenticity’ as
Adorno (1983) put it so virulently: protagonists hurl two opposite definitions of authenticity
at one another, which are both totally absolute and ahistoric: the aesthetic ‘truth content’ of
the autonomous work on one side, the musicographic accuracy to an original, on the other.
But those very definitions are themselves directly descended from the historical formation
of our categories of musical perception and, before that, the fact that a composer from the
past belongs to the present is far from being self-evident; on Baroque music and authenticity,
see Chapter 6, and Dreyfus (1983) for an ironic presentation of the quarrel between Adorno
and the proponents of historically informed performances of Baroque music.
need only think of jazz in the twentieth century). As for Bach, his music has only
two reasons for lasting: to aid in instrumental pedagogy and to provide a formal
model for composition. In both cases, the works that Bach carves out do not aim
to acquire œuvre status, but to propel the creation of music. This discrepancy with
our vain, retrospective demand for him to publish his music reveals the ulterior
work that seized upon a music based on a pattern other than the one that we love
today – following its intense ‘musicalisation’ during the nineteenth century. This
is the heart of the argument: what we no longer see (but what becomes very
visible through a glance back at the nineteenth) is the passage from a Bach who is
transmitted because he teaches music, to a Bach as the very object of our current
love of music.
Another surprise, which also opposes a primary sociologisation (which
would imply saying that we are the ones who ‘make’ Bach), is that Bach
instantly becomes the father of music. His glory does not gradually increase as
we transform him into a genius. His music is hardly even known when it is first
approached and used for serious study.13 He is not ignored, rediscovered little by
little thanks to the pleasure one takes in his music, and finally crowned father of
all music. It is the reverse. First, he is revered and feared, then his music becomes
more well known, and finally, it is loved!14 A unique position, therefore, not in
the sense that his magnificent genius has no equal, but in the historical sense that
the paradigm that he embodies (himself, his music and everything that follows
him) is itself particular, inscribed from the outset in a paternal relationship with
all of the music that is to come after: Bach is at once the law, the foundation, the
model and the absolute science of music.15
13
Rhetorically asserting his being unrecognised is a constant trope through the whole
nineteenth century. Compare this review of the Passion by Léon Kreutzer in 1846: ‘This
stupendous genius was called Jean-Sébastien Bach. In France, Bach’s name, without a
doubt highly regarded by artists, is quite completely unknown to parts of the audience; his
reputation of prodigious science did not serve him well’ (Revue critique. La Passion, de
J.-S. Bach’, R.G.M.P., 17/V/1846), with what E. David still wrote in 1882, in his biography
of Bach: ‘His compositions, with their complicated structure, are so difficult to play that,
in order to appreciate their innumerable beauties, one has to study them, to take a close
look at them. This is impossible for an ordinary musician, and even more for the masses of
audiences. Nothing strange, then, in the fact that his works are little known and have not
gained popularity. In France, Bach is almost totally ignored. People just know, because they
have heard it said, that his work is immense.’
14
This remains the perception of the last people impervious to Bach: a musician
whose music is perfect, but austere.
15
There are countless examples of this rhetoric, e.g. these lines by Antonin Marmontel:
‘… This ideal of beauty has existed for centuries now; a gigantic name summarises it:
J.-S. Bach. This colossus, this absolute … unrivalled genius has invented everything, the
more exquisite melodies, the boldest harmonies, grace, charm, elegancy, idea, form and
content, he has brought into play all of these; from the more naive to the more sublime;
This Bach, installed comfortably in a past that we observe through a

magnifying glass, is in a paradoxical position from which, despite being dead,
he governs over an ever recommencing, indefinitely modern activity that
incessantly continues to produce new versions, revised readings and stripped-
down performances. Bach, seen this way, is the prototypical figure of the
Foucaldian author (Foucault 1977), what he would call a ‘master of discourse’,
in this case the discourse of musicality. All of the work produced in the wake of
Bach is indefinitely attributed back to him, each time adding to his glory, and
provoking, in return, a need to constantly ‘come back’ to the true Bach – to strip
him of the hodgepodge of Romantic ideas in order to understand the rhetorical
dimension of his work, to forget his formalist reputation in order to relocate his
expressivity, and at last, to (re)-discover the Baroque nature of his work. ‘The
‘return to origins’ is always a modernism as well’, as we have seen de Certeau put
it (1988, p. 136, cf. above p. 165): what Souris nicely called ‘Bach today’ (1976).
If such an expression doesn’t shock anyone despite its being terminologically
contradictory, it is because of the chain that has linked together generations of
musicians, music lovers and professionals around a specific attribute – the love
of Bach – while at the same time transmitting, reconstructing and formulating a
repertoire from among his entire œuvre; there is no music produced after Bach
that does not refer back to him. In the same gesture we produce both Bach’s
actuality and the very modern need to free him of these modern disguises, to
break the restorations and the plaster casts that have deformed him.
What this paradoxical movement (one which actually redeems a more and
more historically certified Bach) does not understand, is that the position of
author in which we place him is one that is foreign to him. This position is a
construction that belongs to us, as music lovers from a twentieth century in
search of its origins, for whom the only thing that counts is the music of a creator
who embodies authority better than anyone; authority in the double, parental
meaning of the term: both the author and the one who has authority. We have at
our disposition, thanks to the scores and recordings, a history of the music that
we learned to listen to as a repertoire, a ‘linear’ grouping stretching from A to Z
(Maisonneuve 2001). We listen to a composer whose entire œuvre, upon which
three centuries of musical development is based, is rendered through a series of
very rich performances. Even before these developments, we listened to it as
an œuvre.
None of these characteristics belonged to the age of Bach. He does not write
an Urtext; he simply notes what is to be played the following day. We choose,
compare, and collect works and performances after having learned the music from
what was still called the Well-tempered Harpsichord, under the watchful eye of
a composer surrounded by scholarly editions, popular reviews, and a gigantic
catalogue of recordings and innumerable hagiographies, there where the faithful
and all this, without caring about anything but writing music, without searching any other
feelings’ (1884, p. 26).
heard the daily gospel. The local bourgeois from Leipzig went to St Thomas Kirche
for the Sunday prayers, to listen to the divine message rendered musically through
a music that reworked the Lutheran choirs, and that he would not hear again, for
the thought of playing this music a second time was not even considered.16 This
total continuity of a fleeting music takes the era’s regularly rewritten themes not to
make them part of an œuvre (even less one œuvre d’auteur) but to lead towards the
Word of God. There could be no greater distance from the model of creation, of the
work and of the author – through which we now read Bach, unique creator, ‘into’
which we enter by fragments in order to initiate ourselves into what for many has
become the source of all music, ‘music itself’.
The two combinations of listening are strictly reversed.
‘Bach Today’
Henceforth Bach appears above all as a catalogue of recordings that presents,

according to all schools and beyond all possible polemics (and even some others),
that strange composite object (notably between past and present) that is ‘the
unabridged Bach’: an important specimen that could not truly have any meaning
before the existence of our modern historico-discographical way of listening. One
must understand the improbable character of this composition which links distinct
ages of musicology, taste and means of technological reproduction that comprise
the work of ‘Bach today’. This development gives rise to a catalogue of works that
are more and more established, in a completely new configuration: the material
constitution of a musical repertoire itself constructed like a history.
The over-historicisation of Bach as a dated producer of his manuscripts
occurs at the expense of a chronic under-historicisation of Bach as object of our
melomania. Whether they take themselves for modernist (creating imaginary
taboos to break in order to panic over their own audacity – oh, to dare to cover
with leather and bicycle chains a suburban Bach!) or ‘historical’ (enjoying the
meticulous construction of a vanished context), interpretations of Bach are all
victims of the most brutal of anachronistic short-circuits: who is listening to it,
how, through what categories and what instruments? The viola da gamba or the
perfecto mask microphone and the CD. The accents of the countertenor transport
us to Bach’s era, deliciously making us forget what is the most important and the
least visible: our position as contemporary music lovers who listen to music there
where the religious would let themselves be transported by the Word of God. In
a supreme irony, we add more to the aesthetic delight of his music by revealing
its religious dimension, as a guarantee of lost depth: this is strictly the opposite of
what Bach was doing. He made use of the aesthetic to reach God: we make use of
the religious to reach Bach.
16
It was indeed, sometimes, but not as an ‘œuvre’: in a continuous movement of
rewriting.
But this distinction does not annul our relation to Bach: it feeds into it. Instead
of tracing a clear path between works (primary, and sole witness to Bach’s genius)
and interpretations (historical or modern, but secondary), history presents a fabric
without seams, a texture of interwoven timescales. History reveals a Bach whose
evolution is incessant, as the scores are gradually lost and then found again to
be continuously reinterpreted by musicologists and musicians; as ‘returns to
Bach’ of opposing inspirations succeed one another; as the disk and the radio
replace the church and the rostrum; while musical stars, conscious of the aesthetic
qualifications of their playing, play a repertoire played thousands of times, when
once the faithful sang of their faith. In music, one needs more than archives to
return to the past. One has to train musicians, relearn techniques, create new
music lovers, while, at the same time, recording techniques are being perfected
and editions, versions and references proliferate. All of these ways to preserve the
works, none of which escape controversy, comprise the complex space that has
formed between us and Bach.
Bach is neither the solitary individual born in 1685 to whom we ascribe all the
following history of his œuvre, nor an artificial construct of our modern taste. He
embodies a gigantic mass, in the geological sense, made up of the accumulation
over time and space of a multitude of devices supporting one another, the result
of a great amount of past work and pleasure. To play him one must continually
come into contact with bodies, with objects, with ears, themselves formed and
transformed from within a history of music that owes a great deal to Bach and
that was constructed under his authority. We listen to him today by way of 300
years of collective labour. Through the most modern of devices, which we created
to listen to him, but also because we were listening to him, we made him and he
has made us. These devices continually perfect themselves in their desire for a
‘return to Bach’ (thanks to musicology, to organology, to computerised recording,
to the progress made by performers, to the historicisation of our appreciation). But
the more they do so, the more they invest themselves in this active production of
‘Bach today’, and the more modern they become.
To escape this oscillation between the reduction of Bach to his own persona
and his reduction to an arbitrary reconstruction of our modern taste, it is necessary
to create a mixed history, one that is both a chronicle of taste and of the works
themselves. Each time a new stage in the musical development of Bach’s work
appeared (the development of private instrumental playing, the secularisation of
the pieces, the idea even to develop a designated space and a time for the listening
of music …), and each time an earlier piece was re-examined, the knowledge
of that piece was modified. Indeed, with each reappraisal of the œuvre, a new
composite Bach was created (for aspects of the old were conserved among the
new). Simultaneously, this new use of Bach in turn modified the way one listened
to and appreciated music in general. To follow this history is to see the permanent
zigzags of a Bach who first embodied the German and Protestant spirit and who
then, during the nineteenth century, was to be reinterpreted by the French (both
Catholic and anti-German) into something more universal, although still based
on the same idea of an eternal music following the laws of nature, while in all
domains, from wine tasting to tourism and choirs, the English were inventing
various forms of musical appreciation. At the end of this journey (which took Bach
through Symbolist, rhetorical and then Baroque stages), one better understands
the immensity of ‘Bach’ (and here we would place quotation marks around Bach,
for the term does not simply refer to the cantor of Leipzig). Indeed, this ‘Bach’
contains all of the history that succeeds him.
This opposing side of music is little studied: the history of the transformation
of listening, the invention of the listener – this kind of specialist endowed with a
competence that no one had before the twentieth century, was constituted according
to a historicised musical repertoire spanning from the Middle Ages to our time,
with contradictory interpretations, explanatory booklets and guaranteed filiations
(Hennion, Maisonneuve et al. 2000; see also Chapter 9). It is only by closely
studying the intersecting transformations of our listening, and of the repertoire that
has gradually been composed in response to it, that we will understand the paradox
of the constantly increasing presence, among us, of past composers. Hence this
outline of a socio-historical programme for studying Bach (and perhaps even for
appreciation of his work): not to once again widen the breach between the over-
interpreted Bach ‘himself’ and the current listener (left in the shadows with all of
his modern prostheses for listening), but to remake the history composed of his
works and of centuries worth of appreciation for them.
Bach in Nineteenth-century France
To conclude, let me sketch the difficulties encountered in studying Bach in France,

in the nineteenth century, but also, more as a programme yet to achieve, suggest
the fruitfulness of such a double detour in time and space. In other words, neither
us, nor him:
• neither the genius, the original, Bach himself in his time, to whom we
attribute ever more genius as his greatness has been reinforced by the
passage of time;
• nor ourselves, modern producers of the past, dependent on disks,
musicology and the world of music to manufacture our cult of ancestors;
• but the intermediary work of and on his œuvre, taken in the most concrete
meaning of the term, that which is transmitted through various media
and through multiple interpretations, and which changes us each time by
simultaneously forging our taste and the yardstick by which we measure
that taste.
In order to write this common history of the formation of Bach for us and of us
by Bach, situating ourselves ‘in between’ means empirically placing the accent
on continual and reciprocal (trans)formation of an author who is increasingly
ensconced in his position, as well as on his loving public. The discrepancy is

substantial: there is not one element in this construction of our taste for Bach
that is not gradually redefined, in a progressive work whose results (our way of
listening to Bach as well as his reputation) are constantly evolving. Nor is it a
sociologisation: the œuvre acts even if it transforms; it produces musical society
just as this society produces it.
The advantage of posing the problem in these terms is that it allows us to
encounter concretely a host of intermingled historical and musical elements, the
analysis of which was abandoned by musicologists precisely because the work
of purification attempted to extricate the true Bach from beneath this plaster cast
where previous centuries had hidden him. Purification aimed at shattering these
dummies. Yet, it is the very plaster that interests us. Little by little, the chisel
carves out Bach for us, revealing his progressive musicalisation: and this opens
an immense field, in terms of sources, against a musicological ‘purification’ that
erases the deformations and cracks the nineteenth-century varnish to reach the
original Bach. On the contrary, we are interested in everything that is eliminated
for its impurity – and there is an enormous amount of material: arrangements,
pot-pourri transcriptions, copies, the ‘in the style of …’ tributes: for us, the less
it is pure the more it is true, i.e. the more it is the trace of what was done with
Bach, or in his name, in the nineteenth century. Also, instead of seeing only
scores, all commentary, whether musical or aesthetic (or moral), all introductions,
arrangements or presentations can be seen within the continuity of the scores and
the music (Fauquet and Hennion, op. cit.). All of this speaks to us about the work
in progress at each performance, in its double meaning as both musical execution
and as per-formative rendering of taste: a production intersecting the music and
our competence to appreciate it.
The analysis leads to the musical transmutation, the musicalisation of Bach’s
works, changed into music to listen to, in a movement that is both one of the
causes and one of the results of the more general installation of a new format for
musical taste: that of musical appreciation, of private and public enjoyment of
the repertoire. A slow progression of commentaries promotes Bach from being
one model among others, then from THE model par excellence (i.e. the perfect
example of accomplished composition whose very rigour calls for its use as a
sort of reservoir, concentrating the difficulties of writing and possible solutions,
as an apprenticeship that is allied with an initiation filled with respect before the
most learned and the most profound of musicians), to becoming another figure,
that of a current repertoire, simply music, works to love for themselves. Nothing
signals this late reversal better than the fine commentary on ‘the’ Passion (of
St. Matthew) by Ch. Bannelier in 1874 (asked by Lamoureux to provide a new
translation of this text especially for its performance at the Cirque des Champs-
Élysées): ‘[The Passion is the] culminating point of a period of artistic elaboration
that dates back to a half-century before Bach and that has continued after him,
without his successors seeming to doubt that the final word had been uttered a
long time ago.’ Bach no longer serves to make music: he has made music once
and for all time.
What is more, if the rhetoric regarding the always insufficient notoriety of the
greatest of musicians is stable, the perception of his music changes, passing from
the darkness to light. Taking up the same authors, let us compare the descriptions
employed by L. Kreutzer in 1846: ‘Would it be pretentious to compare [his
compositions] to virgin forests, where everything seems to be shadows and
confusion at first? … The harmony … is extremely rich, but sometimes contains
moments of boldness, oddities that are infinitely difficult to explain even
today … they may appear strange and incomprehensible’ (1846, p. 156), to what
A. Marmontel says in 1884: ‘His most arduous compositions have a marvellous
clarity, their rich harmonies varied and ingenious; in their most exquisite and
audacious explorations, they will always remain incomparably natural’ (1884,
p. 63). Natural! Now here is something new. From now on we will hear Bach. He
has become a composer of our time.
Creating a Musical Taste for the Composers of the Past
Therefore, here is another way of summarising our argument by concentrating

more on the content of concrete analyses: from the case of Bach in nineteenth-
century France, we work on the ‘musicalisation’ of our taste for the music. This
is the issue that I will now address (see Chapter 9): the formation of a specific
competence, increasingly more well-defined, self-sufficient and instrumented, that
makes us appreciate the works according to a regime of connoisseurship – a format
that we stop seeing as we come to belong to it most naturally and intimately. This
was also at the heart of the paradoxes surrounding the revival of Baroque music
(see Chapter 6): the appearance of a past to listen to in a particular fashion, by
respecting its modes of production, is the incredibly elaborated – and very modern –
fruit of such a hypertrophy of musical taste, based on musicology and the progress
in recording. Therefore, it is the culmination of a new transformation of musical
taste and not a passive and anachronistic ‘return to sources’ (an amusing paradox
reveals the very problem we raise: the application of these traditional, therefore,
socially antiquated performances played on modern instruments, is opposed
to ‘new’ performances precisely because they are played on old instruments!).
Nothing is more modern than an historical approach to an old repertoire.
Indirectly, the avatars of Bach in the nineteenth century also speak of our
present taste for Bach, seen through the lens of the archaeology of modes of
appreciation through which we appreciate him today but which were put in place
in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century debates that come to define,
little by little, what music would be, there is none where Bach is not called upon
to testify: debates on spirituality, affinity with nationality and with universality,
religion, speech, formalism, symbolism, expression, pedagogy, virtuosity, science.
However, modes of appreciation also imply the material frameworks of this
aestheticised appreciation: concerts, scores for amateurs, systematic pedagogic

use by teachers of piano, an increasingly well established and commented
repertoire and, finally, from the twentieth century onward, systematic recordings
comparable to this abundantly discussed repertoire, presented, organised and
constantly reinvented in a manner that a more and more faithful return to origins
partially denies.
Intermezzo
A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall …
This is a personal account of a rock concert, as seen from the concert hall by
several sociologists whose brief was not to predetermine the state we would get
in, but on the contrary take care to note how it might arise within us, how we
might move from polite boredom to engagement with the collective excitement
of the audience.
I am leaving the Porte de Pantin. The Zénith is some way away. I am walking
down alleyways, past the fencing surrounding the Cité de la Musique. I remember
the feeling of going to a demo: before the great gathering, small groups which are
heading for the same place, and know that they are going there, keep their distance
from each other as they walk there, careful not to join up before it’s time.
Inside the temple, a first group of rock musicians is performing, mostly to
break the ice: people listen to them with a studied air of absent-mindedness, they
have a drink, eat a sandwich, chatter near the exits; they haven’t come to listen to
this group. They are keeping their distance, saving their energy for the encounter
to come. However, the time-old mechanisms which the theatre uses to capture
the attention of the audience are in place. As it so happens, the previous night,
I had been to the opera to see Strauss’ Elektra. I find here what I saw there: the
stage all lit up, the hall plunged in darkness, the raised podium, the circle of the
onlookers’ eyes, the singers’ flashy costumes and ritual gestures. Technological
change, as they say on television, is not obvious in technology itself, but in its
all-pervading presence as a constituent part of the show. Relatively discreet at the
opera, which does little more than project a fake trompe-l’œil curtain over the real
curtain, technology here is everywhere on show, from the guitar to amps, and from
the PA system to synths, and from the light show to the hall’s metallic framework.
In the concert hall, the crowd is divided into two: one half is standing in the
mosh pit, a fairly large space over which the stage encroaches, like a pontoon
over the sea, while the more sedentary half sits on the surrounding rows of seats.
A more mobile intermediary level thus serves as a link between the stage and
the seats, like a sort of self-appointed chorus, generated by this nightclub dance
floor, sandwiched between the seated audience and the group on stage. This
standing crowd is interesting. Seen from the seats, they seem ‘hooked’: already
homogeneous in their darkened room, they sway to the rhythm, undulating, touched
by the first ripples of pleasure, inviting the as-yet-unmoved seated audience to
follow suit. But seen from the ground floor, this standing crowd is not yet fully
committed. It is composed of individuals who are still separate: they eye each
other cautiously, very careful to stay in control, and, aware that no, they are not
hooked, they are waiting, mindful not to overtake the music. Near me, a few girls
are dancing, Copacabana-style, to convince themselves they are ‘gone’, unlike the
others, who are lazily beating out a token rhythm, often in a tempo which is half
that of the piece being played. The people nearest to the girls watch but don’t get
involved. Far from catching on, for now, excessive enthusiasm isolates individuals
in rigid individual attitudes. Everyone is still separate and still watching everyone
else. One eye on the stage, and another on those around them, they are still far
from being a crowd. They are still observing the ritual, not yet falling into a trance.
When the lights come back on and the management plays old hits which make
me feel young again, the funereal quality of a ritual is emphasised by the almost
indecent exposure of the scene laid bare by the spot lights. Here we are, after all
these years of wave after wave of new movements, endless attempts to recreate the
world, leather here and non-violence there, each with its generation and lifestyle,
its idols and smoke screens, still sitting fingering the glossy programme with
its pictures of musicians and their airbrushed careers, yawning away as if at the
Opera, and being served at the bar by sweaty men waddling around in their jacket
and ties, after politely clapping in between each piece just a moment ago … This is
the calm before the storm, the deceptive banality of bourgeois form – we’re having
a night out – and who know where this will lead?
When the Mediators start playing, just late enough to have made us impatient,
the crowd is happy. The more it gets into the swing of things, the more I withdraw:
I can feel myself retreating, establishing in spite of myself an unbridgeable
distance between us. The Mediators are nothing to me: rock music of course
dropped dead the moment I turned my back on it. Far from helping me to see
more clearly the mechanics behind the visual spectacle, my external perspective
blinds me to everything. I think of the Opera again. They have much in common:
an enclosed space, where people have deliberately chosen to come, paying good
money to listen to what they love; the stage, the applause, the lighting. Most of all,
I am aware that my present position provides me with a new reading: although I
know that until recently I would see only gods on the stage, all I can see tonight
is the auditorium with its puppets, that I find vaguely repellent because they let
themselves be carried away. However, I realise that this is unfair: last night, at
the Opera, there were no fewer visual effects, signs of mutual complicity, cultural
codes and conventions than those I have automatically noted here, as a knee-
jerk sociologist, and they had no negative impact on my appreciation. How can I
describe this experience as a collective construct if its meaning depends entirely
on whether I belong or not? Is what happens on stage entirely a question of belief?
I find myself wondering about theories of belief and sociologists’ debates
on the collective phenomena that they observe. As a non-believer, all I see is a
mechanism devised in order to stage events for others. I am struck above all by
the arbitrariness of the experience, which depends entirely on complicity between
those who believe because they want to believe. All I see are the special effects of
what immediately appears to me to be the staging of an illusion. This sociological
perspective is forever unable to recognise that belief can be nothing more than
an illusion referring necessarily to something other than itself. But the reverse
A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall … 263
position of the believer is no more convincing: he would tell me not to stop at what
I see, that this whole set up and all this play acting are not what matters, of course,
it is just that we have to come together and give substance to our shared vision,
but this is not the main thing, this is superficial: what counts is the event itself.
This believer’s sympathetic outlook is as powerless as the non-believer’s neutral
stance to transmit anything, except for a slight shift in perspective. According to
an ethnologist, with his critical perspective, there is nothing in this experience that
the participants have not contributed themselves: but whatever he says, however
cunningly he cloaks himself in scientific discourse, he speaks the language of
the non-believer, which is as old as belief itself. On the contrary, there is a real
presence, according to the ethnologist once he has become one of them, having
morphed into a fan. On the one hand, we have the special effects, and on the
other we have faith, which is impervious to reason. Is there no way to bridge the
Great Divide?
Perhaps by walking a tight rope: the crowd itself is not fooled. On the contrary
it knowingly develops its changing dynamic. Neither believe nor doubt. Neither
participate nor criticise. But take as the object of study the very divide which the
spectacle creates. Leave the actors with their oscillation between participation and
criticism. Instead of making a personal statement about the state of a crowd, and
reducing it to this description, either turning it into a fanatical mass manipulated
by its masters if you are a non-believer, or seeing it as an infinitely multiplied
projection of yourself if you are a believer, why not walk into its midst to see this
division at work in the crowd, enjoying its changing states, checking itself out,
forever moving from insider to outsider, from expectancy to ecstasy, from irony to
trance, from musical judgement to voluntary abandon, from being carried away by
the music to enjoying its sheer strength.
This very movement becomes the unintended focus of my account. I take as
my starting point the importance of paying close attention to the way in which
the performance modifies the boundaries between the bodies. This is a fruitful
approach: it allows me to move away from an opposition between opera and
rock music based on rigid aesthetic criteria, towards a focus on the observable
difference in the ways in which they affect the body. Amid the overwhelming
beat, the rhythm of the sound system which makes the floor shake, the polyphonic
movement of the hands, the heads, the feet beating in time to the sound of the
music, which translates the group’s physical feeling of togetherness, rock music
brings the audience up onto the stage, turning each individual into the alter ego
of the rock star presented for collective sacrifice on the stage. In contrast, the
opera operates according to a system of bodily alienation. The ascetic discipline
it demands is a powerful way of projecting the mind onto the stage, far from the
body, left in the shadow to struggle with its uncomfortable seating arrangements:
in between the liberating explosions of shouting and clapping at the end of every
great aria, each member of the audience sits frozen in uncomfortable silence,
forced to strain his neck if he wants to see anything at all, afraid to budge in
his creaky seat. The body in motion versus the body stock still. In this sense,
the rock concert is an empty stage whereas the opera is an altar. At the opera,
we are motionless and project ourselves forward. At a rock concert, we mobilise
ourselves collectively, and following the rippling movement of the crowd, we surf
towards the front, almost onto the stage, as if to take the place of the actors in this
drama1 – that is when overexcited ‘moshing’ fans don’t literally throw you there.
These two modes of behaviour are in fact not so different, in light of the
violence that the performance simultaneously echoes and rejects. This is the
paradox of the opera: a worldly, polite, audience, mocked by others for its
superficial snobbery, austerely and complicitly performs a rite filled with
a deep and silent passion. In this rite, pleasure is withheld, postponed, ready
to burst out, to judge or acclaim the singers. And the audience is so involved
in ‘its’ performance2 that it no longer can hear the intended meaning of a text
neutralised by its operatic staging, even though Elektra is awash with the blood
of collective violence. Performed and made explicit in the text, this violence
is stifled in the hall. In contrast, although not very present in rock lyrics, and
far from being at the heart of the performance,3 violence is omnipresent in a
rock concert, and forms the virtual horizon of the crowd’s collective movement.
In its mimetic drive, the crowd is extremely attentive to its own actual and –
especially – potential excesses, checking them if they come from headstrong
trouble-makers, or idolising them if they are part of the history of rock.4 The
opera speaks only of violence without this being heard by the audience, who
only experience this violence through the repression they inflict on their bodies:
nothing emerges in the hall, apart from the audience’s alternation between
respectful silence and its enthusiasm, that is sometimes very boisterous, but
always highly coded – ‘Bravooo …!!’. In contrast, at the Zénith, there is no
verbal expression of the collective violence which the crowd constantly flirts
with throughout the performance, letting it carry them away, while nevertheless
carefully controlling the timing and excesses of an experience, whose rise and
fall are at the very centre of their congregation.
In other words, rock music is less about actual violence – as denounced
by its opponents’ arguments or denied by its new disciples’ protestations at
the Ministry of Culture – than about repression and sublimation: this violence
has been transformed into a shared nostalgia for an excessively dangerous but
seductive game … In which case, this says something about me too, and my lack
1
The most excited climb on stage, propelled by this collective force. Contrariwise,
the Who threw themselves into the crowd, starting the now ritual practice of ‘slamming’.
2
Cf. M. Poizat (1986).
3
Although, from the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street fighting man’ to Punk or Heavy Metal,
rock music has never stopped flirting with the verbal violence of provocation, insults and
blasphemy.
4
We have only to think of the ambiguous reputation of leather-clad Titans of rock
concerts, from the murderous Hells Angels of Altamont Speedway, to the brutish bouncers
of the KCP, the security services of French rock concerts in the 1970s and 1980s.
A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall … 265
of engagement can be explained as the withdrawal of the poker player suddenly

frightened to see the size of the stakes: ‘I am not playing anymore ….’ Realising
how far I had projected into my impressions, I leave the concert hall, telling
myself that at least I have not tried to judge an alien performance negatively, as
an outsider: I was akin to a veteran, seeing my younger self in the people I was
watching around me a moment ago.
Chapter 9
Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity1
Performing works of music, whether for their own pleasure, or whether to entertain
a Mistress or a Friend is beneath them. But slaving away over a harpsichord for
three or four years, in order to attain the glorious status of being admitted as a
concert player, and to sit between two violins and a double bass at the Opera, and to
stitch together a few chords, more or less awkwardly, never to be heard by anyone
else: such is their noble ambition
J. Le Cerf de La Viéville, Comparaison de la musique
italienne et de la musique française, 1705, pp. 104–5
Before concluding this book, I will let music lovers speak. To my mind, this
chapter resembles an invitation for further research, rather than a finished piece
of work. At the same time, since I have stated that there is no music if it is not
experienced, it is natural to turn to those who enjoy it, in so many ways. I will
therefore not treat music lovers as receivers, as if they were the end product of a
linear chain running from production to reception. Rather, I will see them as the
starting point of any musical reality as it comes into being. They will teach us what
music as experience is.
Sociology has a lot to gain in treating the music lover respectfully. By conceiving
taste as a reflexive activity (Frow 1995, Frith 1996), it is possible to restore the
importance of the objects concerned, of the often highly elaborate formats and
procedures that music lovers employ and collectively discuss in order to attain a
state of bliss, of the nature of the activity thus deployed, of the competence involved
and hence, above all, of creative and not only reproductive capacities: as Frith
rightly argued against Bourdieu’s unilateral thesis on cultural domination, this is
as pertinent in the case of popular culture as it is with high culture – if not more:
he shows fans spending hours and hours, late at night, discussing every detail of
rock records and performances. This means acknowledging what happens through
these attachments and what is produced in terms of objects, communities, relations
with others and with the self, and the music lovers themselves. Taste, passion,
various forms of attachment are not primary data, music lovers’ fixed properties
that can simply be deconstructed analytically. People are active and productive;
they constantly transform objects and works, performances and tastes. By focusing
on the pragmatic and performative nature of cultural practices, the analysis can
1
The material for this chapter comes from Figures de l’amateur (Hennion,
Maisonneuve and Gomart 2000). This translation has been revised, but most of the text
comes from ‘Music Lovers: Taste as Performance’, a paper published in Theory, Culture
and Society (Hennion 2001).
highlight their capacity to transform sensibilities and create new ones, and not only
to reproduce an existing order without knowing what they do.
Indeed, in this direction, popular culture and rock studies have paved the
way for us, opening to a much wider understanding not only of so-called ‘low-
brow’ genres but of music analysis in general, regarding both its production and
reception: media, staging, the making of stars’ images, recording techniques and
the record industry, youth as a new market, all those issues were put at the centre
of analyses, and not conceived as purely technical or economic realities ‘beside’
music itself.2 On the audiences’ side, musical analyses could no longer be isolated
from the social, sexual, generational and political meanings of music, nor could
listening be separated from its highly ritualised and collective accomplishment
(Willis 1972, Hebdige 1979, Frith 1981), as the active practices of music lovers
were put under minute ethnographical scrutiny (Bennett 1980, Cohen 1991). This
supposes a dual movement, a shift in focus from reflection on what disciplinary
tools at our disposal can do with music, to a questioning of what music does. At
the same time, this means switching from a music-centred focus to a focus on
the music lover, taste and listening (Morrow 1989, Johnson 1995, DeNora 2000,
Szendy 2001). This switches the focus from a conception founded on the critical
sociology of music to a pragmatic conception of musical passion.
From a Sociology of Music to a Pragmatics of Musical Passion
Musics are made, they make their world and their listeners, and are measured only
through what they make. Just as we have seen, in the cases of the Baroque revival
or Bach, that music is a history writing its own history, so in the present time it is
a reality making its own reality. This is why we need to follow the way in which
pieces and languages, but also bodies, societies, objects, writings, ways of judging
and ways of listening circulate, producing sets of works, publics increasingly able
and desirous to perceive them, and, more generally, collective frames enabling this
activity to be deployed in all its diversity. Such a pragmatics aims at restoring the
performative nature of the activity of taste, instead of making it an observance.
When one says that one loves opera or rock – and what one likes, how one likes it,
why, etc. – this is already a way of liking it more, and vice versa. Music is event
and advent, which means that it is perpetually transformed by any contact with its
public, on whose listening it inevitably depends. Tasting does not mean signing
one’s social identity, labelling oneself as fitting into a particular role, observing a
rite or passively reading the properties ‘contained’ in a product as best one can. It
is a performance: it acts, engages, transforms and is felt.
The challenge is to explain the music lover’s attachments, tastes, ways of
acting and pleasures, as an activity in its own right and an elaborate competence,
2
Among precursors, see Hirsch (1970), Gillett (1972), Peterson (1975) and Frith
(1978).
Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity 269
capable of self-criticism – instead of seeing it only as the passive play of social

differentiation. The latter view is now generalised to the point where music lovers
often present their own tastes exclusively as pure social signals, determined by
their origin, that they know to be relative and historical, pretexts for diverse
rituals – and, paradoxically, it is the sociologist who must ‘de-sociologise’ the
music lover for her to talk about her pleasure, or the amazing techniques she
develops to (sometimes) attain felicity. For the music lover is a virtuoso when
it comes to experimentation, aesthetics, techniques, the social, the mental and
the corporeal. Far from being the ‘cultural dope’ referred to by Garfinkel (1967),
the great music lover on whom we focus here is the model of an inventive,
reflexive actor, closely linked to a collective, obliged constantly to put to the
test the determinants of the effects she seeks regarding works or products, social
and mimetic determinism of taste, conditioning of body and mind, dependence
on a collective, a vocabulary of social practices and, lastly, material devices
and practices invented to intensify her feelings and perceptions. Music acts and
moves, in relation to other mediations; it transforms those who take possession
of it and do something else with it. Conversely, it does not denote the same thing,
depending on the situation and the time.
In our inquiries, this led us to adopt a broad definition of music lovers as ‘users
of music’, that is active practitioners of a love for music, whether it involves
playing, being part of a group, attending concerts or listening to records or the
radio: there are no grounds for claiming that some forms are merely passive
consumption (attending a concert, listening to a record, etc.) and therefore not
worthy of being included in music lover practice. Conversely, there is no reason
either for instrument playing or singing to benefit from preferential treatment and
automatically to be placed on a higher level. There is undoubtedly very passive
playing of music and surely very active listening to it, in the sense of connoisseur
expertise and the impassioned development of a competence (in a no less
traditional sense of the word amateur, in French, more usual in the case of cigars,
wine or coffee). Maybe this forces us to jettison the use of a single word, like
taste, or music lover, with their strong connotations, focused on the consumption
of a precious object. Love, passion, taste, practices, habits, mania, obsessions: the
plurality of the vocabulary indicates the variety of possible configurations of the
link to music. It is important not to define it too much a priori, and especially not
to measure it in relation only to taste for an object whose appreciation necessitates
scholarly learning. It is not only a matter of the choice of an over-selective social
format, but also of not making hasty assumptions on the meaning of these practices
in which the place and status of music itself are very far from being determined.
We play music, we like it, we listen to it, this piece or that genre pleases us: verbs
are more appropriate as they do not so much suggest a passive collective practice
using objects, as a practice actively directed towards an object.
This is a surprisingly fertile empirical approach for a sociologist: the same
people who are at a loss for words and make excuses when they are asked about
their tastes become remarkably inventive when describing what they do when
one asks them not what they like but how they form attachments, with whom,
what they do, how they go about it – even if this poses countless new problems,
of vocabulary for example, because they are describing intimate practices and
situations which are rarely verbalised. Hence, the necessity to conduct interviews
on site and to rely on real listening situations, so that habitual gestures and
dispositions naturally occur, with the presence of the objects and the familiarity of
the setting. What matters is not to draw up a catalogue, but to describe variations
in states. In fact, accounts and observations show clearly to what extent music is
nothing without everything it relies on. Better still, it is everything it relies on. I
shall provide evidence in this matter drawn from our surveys on the various media
of musical consumption today: concerts, radio, records, amateur performances,
playing in groups, bands, choirs, etc.
A ‘Discomorphosis’ of Music
Looking at the different means of access to music – how people buy discs, listen
to music in concert, in the street, in other places, how they are affected by music
in supermarkets, movie music and, in some cases, how they play an instrument, on
their own or in a group – brings us to the very crux of being a music lover today,
an activity which largely revolves around the practice of listening to recorded
music. Never before has the history of music been so much at our command,
in the sense of a chronology of works (it can be seen on the shelves of record
stores, and in the record collections and computers of the music lovers), and yet
the availability of music from any time and place – music as a product – in the
form of a consistent repertoire of recordings, is actually a negation of music as
history and culture – music as a production. The appearance of the listener turned
customer is, at least as much as that of the music itself, the musical creation of the
twentieth century. We are dealing with an instrumentalised, somewhat solitary,
new mode of listening. This is a very widespread mode of listening even if, being
intimate, it is experienced in a very personal way. Typically, at the same time as
people emphasise the unconventional and personal way in which they listen to
music, saying: ‘This is how I do it’, their actions and idiosyncrasies mirror those
of thousands of other music lovers. And with good reason. Intimacy has nothing
to do with a unique practice; on the contrary, it is the most characteristic product
of the modern discomorphosis of listening (Hennion et al., op. cit. 2000), of the
reflexive work common to record sellers and music lovers to shape and format
today’s love for music.
Records tend to replace concerts. Considering the time devoted to listening to
music at home, they serve as a reference for taste in music. To that ‘discomorphosis’
of the repertoire corresponds an equally important discomorphosis of taste, in
its content but also in its forms and formats. The record is the ideal medium for
distinguishing, on a continuum, the subtle differences of the music lover’s state of
mind: from fidelity to one’s own tastes, to moments of entertainment, to episodes
of tranquil mania, it fills up the music lover’s world. All that by dosing comfort and
surprise, the smooth and the rough, ordinary pleasure and rare moments. Music
cannot be classified by records chosen. There are works that one loves infinitely
but seldom listens to and vice versa. There is also a big difference between a choice
of the moment and a ‘serious’ hierarchy of tastes that is argued and accepted:
I’m always amazed by the difference between composers that I love and records
that I like listening to. I often talk about it with friends, other great inveterate
music lovers, it’s the same. For me, typically, it’s Schubert, Bach, compared
to Schumann or Debussy – although they’re just as venerated, God I’m mad
about them, but I’ll put them on far less often. (PA, M, 45 years old, collector of
Classical records)
This record lover distinguishes certain musicians as being familiar, as if it were

not a question of aesthetic quality, as if the record had its own smoothness that
only certain genres respected and, posthumously, certain authors. Publishers and
music lovers are aware of this new mediation which ‘renders’ more or less well,
depending on the genre, the work and the instruments. Recordings follow specific
listening curves, once acquired (discovery, learning, tiring, return, allergy, or
definitive memorisation and stability …). Some re-emerge, some are forgotten,
some remain there without crying out to be heard again. What has to be listened
to frequently? This essential criterion for a record is distinct from musical quality.
There are two symmetrical experiences involved in the choice of discs, which stem
from the ambivalent nature of the passion, that of hunting for the right recording
and that of enjoying it in private: short obsessive lists, marked up journals and
reviews, ritual modus operandi and methods of perusing the shelves, allow us
to be able to listen to it at some other time and somewhere else, if we want.
Slowly and carefully shaping a personal record library does not preclude impulse
longings, uncontrollable urges to listen to a certain disc, when ‘no other will do’: it
actually generates them. Recordings have become the touchstones of a completely
unprecedented aesthetic experience, the personalised enjoyment of a continually
expanding ‘programme’.
Far from highlighting a hidden reality of taste behind the appearances of
the record market, interviews reveal the extent to which this sociologisation of
music lovers has progressed, and how much they share the categories and formats
gradually developed by the music industry. What is actually being expressed, is
the meticulous care with which music lovers construct an area devoted to personal
listening, and the importance of a space like this which puts them in the right frame
of mind and enables them to find what they are looking for. For some people –
executives, employees, doctors, teachers – the almost clandestine nature of this
passion, the sensation of leading a ‘double life’, emphasised by the ritualistic
aspect of listening to music which involves setting aside space and time in their
daily routine, is very marked:
My wife can’t stand it, she doesn’t share my passion at all, she thinks I’m
wasting all my money, “I treat myself”, as she says – of course she means it
critically. On the one hand it’s a pity, we often fight about that, especially the
money I spend on records, and the evenings when I leave her alone … But on
the other hand I also think that it saves me in a way …. (BH, M, 54 years old,
choir and harmony, rural area)
There have always been professionals, music, the stage, the public recital, dance,
sculpture and painting – everywhere where there has been ritual, religious, political
or social activity. What is new is not the public execution of artistic activities by
professionals; it is the rise of the music lover. It is the creation of a targeted public
of music lovers that attend precisely for a particular performance. This refers not
only to a mass public and a market, but also to a new competence, slowly and
painstakingly elaborated through devices, practices, objects, repertoires and new
social formats, thus producing new individual and collective sensibilities and, even
before that, new auditory capacities and new attention – this may be what made
so meaningful in the case of rock the word ‘generation’, with its double sense.
Precisely what we could call a musical body – in the sense that prompts W. Weber
(1997) to wonder whether people really listened to music in the eighteenth century:
without the complex set of devices and dispositions that make up our ear, is using
the word ‘to listen’ with regard to another century not a pure anachronism?
The Creative Capacities of the Music Lover
Some people rewrite their lives around listening to music or after its discovery:
I think that sorted out a serious emotional problem, in that atmosphere of a

provincial middle-class high school, completely lousy, abject. I was self-
conscious, the awkward teenager type, so ill-at-ease I could die. Oh, it’s simpler
than that, I was gay. I still am, of course, but I mean that was my problem, it
wasn’t ok at all, I felt guilty, I got the feeling nobody liked me, I was obsessed
with the idea that if they spoke to me it was to mock me … And then there
was this tall guy whose parents led a choir where he sang and was the star, and
of course I thought he was beautiful, what a fool … I found myself singing
two evenings a week, on Sunday mornings, and in concerts and tours. I never
stopped doing so. The conductor was useless, today I’d find the repertoire vile,
but I was … I was … I’ll stop because I was thinking “transfigured”: you see,
I’m not mincing my words, but it’s true, it still touches me just to think about it.
I’d never done any music whatsoever before … And it was Handel, very soon,
Renaissance pieces, and lousy things for choirs, pieces that were in fashion at
the time, silly stuff, I couldn’t give a damn now, but I was happy, and very soon
I was one of the leaders. I can’t tell you how much enjoyment I got out of those
sessions. Even now it’s a very special moment in my life. Of course there were
good looking guys (and ugly ones) but that wasn’t it, I felt good that’s all, I used
my voice as a means to be with them. (HLS, M, 47 years old, choir)
Body, sexuality, subjectivity look like unexpected byproducts of his musical

activity. He does not talk about music, but about his own emerging self, and the
pleasure of it, through the details of an organised practice, full of people, of objects
and of gestures. Another case similar is ABK, a 43-year-old faculty professor of
North African origin:
I bought a good-quality CD player and case for 24 compact discs, and for three
years I made the Paris-Lyon, Lyon-Paris train journey twice a week. When
I finally realised I would never get to work on the high-speed train after the
classes, I began to listen to music systematically. In the beginning I listened to
things I knew, dance music, Brazilian, Arab-Andalusian, potpourris, but later I
got into music I was unfamiliar with. I asked Annie more and more for Classical
music, and now for me this music is definitively linked to the high-speed train. I
followed the landscape associated with the music. It is what happens, not hearing
anything around me other than seeing the landscape pass while listening to the
band march by. I see the rhythms of the valleys, the changes of light … I say this
poetically but in truth it is simpler than that. I am an architect, and perhaps for
this reason I finally found the way to see music in space and understand it. That
is it, I fabricated my own screen.
Now I no longer go to Lyon. When I travel by train I don’t always remember

to take my compact discs, anyway it is not the same any more, regularity is
required, I believe … Concerning my musical repertoires, this has provoked
something strange: now I know many types of music, especially when I listen
to Annie’s compact discs again, but I don’t know what I am listening to because
cases, names didn’t stay in my mind and I really had no idea about anything.
Although it is obviously Baroque or ancient, chamber music or opera, I cannot
differentiate between them. I know them by heart but I don’t know whether it is
Mozart or something modern.
A still less orthodox way of experiencing it opened ABK up to an entire space

of music that he was completely unfamiliar with up until then. A kind of ironic
loyalty to his past (he is both the son of Algerian immigrants and an acknowledged
professional in his field, as is clear from the interview) led him not to name this
newly discovered music, as opposed to his detailed recollections as a traveller. This
allowed him to familiarise himself with a heritage while keeping it at a distance
(in short, yes to music, no to naming it!). There is something of a challenge in this.
This challenge is difficult to measure with accuracy, especially in sociological
terms. ABK linked it to his double social identity, assuming (reflexivity again …)
that this was what mattered to his interviewer. He has invented a kind of musical
magic lantern. The highly personal expression he chooses to reveal his experience
to me, the adopted dependence on the tastes of his companion, to whom he
completely delegates the task of providing him with music, and the unusual
aspect of an attachment to Classical music achieved via this medium, all this
merely emphasises the way in which the internal screen, as he calls it, operates,
encouraged by the new-found anonymity of the compact disc listener
For others, music is the natural environment, the binder of relations with those
around them; they can hardly imagine its absence because it is part of community
life. They are music lovers kind to sociologists: music for them is but a milieu:
I started piano lessons before I was seven; I played music with my mother and
my big brother. My brother did violin with my piano teacher’s husband. I still
take lessons with her, but not regularly anymore. I played in her end-of-year
recitals years after finishing high school. I still play, although I work less. I play
the pieces I used to like. Sometimes I try to work on a new one. What I like is
Fauré, Chopin, Schumann, in short, big composers. I also did a lot of Ravel,
and chamber music, with friends, especially with my teachers, with brothers
and sisters of piano students …. (QM, F, 28 years old; Classical music, piano;
expensive flat, average record collection and lots of sheet music)
But this is only a way of having it. It can be contrasted for instance with this
interview, just in the opposite register, of a very sociable music lover:
We do it for a laugh. It’s possible to do lots of things, if you choose well, but if
you’ve got to practice for hours and hours there’s no point. I do transcriptions
but nobody comes every single time … People, they keep changing … I say
that but not really, in fact, it’s friends, we’ve known each other for a long time,
there’s one leaving, or a guy’s chick who arrives (I say that but there aren’t many
girls, and even fewer without a guy!), things move like that. There aren’t so
many of us now, also, there were as many as fifteen of us four or five years ago.
We do Schubert, slow movements (not only, we also do allegros!), a thing by

Poulenc, it’s funny, what else? everything the guys bring along, the Art of the
Fugue, I mean some extracts, a Brazilian thing, lots of sardañas and pasos, and
so on. But we also do things, Brahms choruses, an Enesco, once, things that
nobody knows. We did more jazz, I remember, Ellington or Monk, once, but
rather Classical jazz. We’re a bit limited for improvisation, that limits us for
jazz. Once we transcribed hits, just for a laugh: “Michelle”, and a slow hit by
the Stones, but a brass band’s not made for that. I say brass band as a joke, it’s a
little wind band, in fact.
Of course we go for a drink afterwards, often, but it’s mostly outings, concerts
in bandstands in the spring, playing for festivals where we get the feeling we’re
playing together, where we mess around together afterwards … It’s important,
it’s our party piece. (KRC, M, 39 years old, clarinet, leads a wind band; collection
of wind instruments, many records, all types and styles)
Here, to be social is not to belong to a milieu, but to have an active and joyful
social life with close friends. Each on their way, these small groups build up their
own sociology of taste, in the same way as they develop their listening techniques
and create their traditions (depending on the genre of music, other places
are very typical, like specialist stores or music clubs). Others ensure that they
have a continuous musical accompaniment, with the clock radio, the earphones
in the subway, the radio as they fall asleep, even, in some jobs, the possibility
of playing compact discs at the office: a great fan of rock music who worked
on a magazine told me how they had perfected a system which enabled them
to take turns choosing which compact discs to play, thereby solving one of the
age-old problems experienced by music lovers: achieving the right mix between
old favourites and new discoveries. ‘Music itself’ is not apart from this reflexive
and collective work of co-formation. Amateur instrumentalists also re-chisel their
repertoire, suited to themselves:
What counts is that with musicians it works. It doesn’t depend so much on the
composers; some pieces nobody likes playing, they don’t fit, we can’t “hold”
them even if they’re very beautiful. There’s also the level; it has to be clear, so
that we know where we are. If as soon as you lose a note you can’t find your
place again that won’t do. We do it, but it doesn’t work. Otherwise, whether it’s
Bach or a habañera, it works. But with a bossa-nova we’ll make a mess. (ZT,
M, 49 years old, leader of a brass band and a municipal orchestra in a small
provincial town; working class)
Saying the Intimacy of Emotion
Less concerned with the written music than the lover of quartets, the opera lover
(because of the singing, the body, the divas, the tendency to eroticise the voice) is
more prone to thinking about music in terms of attaining intense states of emotion,
and approaches the music partly with this emotional factor in mind:
I’m a pretty typical lover of lyrics, unbearable and dogmatic, I know everything
and I’m proud of it. I couldn’t give a hoot about notes and all that, I like voices,
arias and divas, the atmosphere of an opera, I read, collect articles, I give marks
to performances, recitals … really crazy, no half measures. Not so much the
directors, I’ve got friends who do that, what I really like is the singing, voices
and phrasing. Is it divine or not? It sounds easy enough, but it takes some effort,
if we take it seriously. But otherwise, for me that’s the real socialite, it’s not
me it’s the person who goes to the opera without finding that, excuse the term,
essential, er … vital, do I have the right to say that, I don’t know! (HC, M, 34
years old, many records, goes to the opera all the time, in France and elsewhere)
The comparison with the vocabulary of drug addicts, or with sexuality, is

continually brought into play, as much by observers as by participants; however,
although this is a convenient analogy, it goes far deeper than simple metaphor:
For me it’s a need, a drug, I’m very nervous, I stop everything and listen to a
record, or I play, or sing, I lie down and close my eyes, it helps me to live, music
is so beautiful. I go to concerts a lot, also, sometimes with my husband, but often
alone or with friends who sight-read with me, it’s a small circle. (DM, F, 49
years old, plays the piano and sings, intellectual milieu, many records)
An interesting point is that the most highly valued thing of all, the ability to be
carried away by the sublime, is expressed in the same terms as being under the
influence of drugs: we are ‘taken out of ourselves’, ‘nothing else counts’… But
there is no real reason either to favour the word climax, a typically operatic term,
to talk about the love of music: using a register of language that deals with ‘true
emotion’ is just one way of referring to an access to passion which cannot be
described in words, as it looks completely incommensurate in comparison with the
overly narrow, accepted view of the pleasure. Some develop spontaneously quite
technical analyses of their emotion:
I went to see both castings of La Sonnambula, I preferred Liliana Faraon. It was

less virtuoso than the Korean but more moving. The tone was richer. Something
happened. The other was an image of a more stereotyped character. Of course,
her vocalisation was fabulous, in her last aria in particular. But there was less to
it. (MG, 38 years old, senior executive, loves opera)
Conversely, this is probably what is expressed in the reserve of the amateur quartet
player when listening to comments that over-psychologise musical pleasure: what
is happening ‘in’ the music, outside us, also counts:
It may sound stupid, but what interests me is the music, when I play with others.
I’m quite shy by nature, I don’t like the well-known stuff, the “I love that, I hate
that” kind of stuff, discussions on rendering, I can’t see the point. Nor do I like
the gang of friends aspect, especially the two girls, I like them but we only see
each other when we play. No, if I play a quartet with them it’s because we all
want the same thing, and what we do there I can only do there, the pleasure of a
movement that’s a bit hard, to hear oneself, to listen to one another, to get onto
the pianissimos that we’ve all done well because we felt them together. Nothing
can beat that, for me. (CS, M, 42 years old, violin, member of an amateur quartet
that has been playing together for ten years, except for one more recent member)
I carried out an in-depth interview with an amateur saxophonist who plays with a
small group of friends, and who continues to practise two evenings per week until
two or three in the morning, although he works an eight-hour day, in a bid to attain
the occasional state of emotion when ‘it comes together’, when ‘a man shows
what he is made of’ (these were his words: and they describe so much more than
the simple pursuit of an emotional pleasure): and he felt that way simply because
four felicitous notes appeared out of the blue ….
Music lovers’ musical spaces are not to be interpreted as external spaces
(even if we have to start with the materialised elements of music: music
lover organisations, schools, published catalogues, concert halls, shops, radio
programmes, etc.), but as internal spaces in which music lovers move mentally
when they feel like playing a piece, choose a performance, buy a ticket, put
on earphones, switch their radio on or off. Listening has its moments and its
wavering. Loss of attention may be easy to spot in the example of listening
to recordings, but it is equally present in the playing of an instrument, at a
concert, or as the internal state of a musician in a group, a choir, an orchestra
or a wind band. The attachment of value to moments of intense concentration
(difficulty, tricky passage, spectacular moment, preferred passage) soon leads
to a description of musical practice exclusively in the regime of inspired
transport and continuous enthusiasm. It is at least as important, and probably
more realistic, to describe the cruising speed, speckled with moments of loss of
attention, of routine passages executed unthinkingly (which in no way excludes
the pleasure), of distractions and absence – which gives more force to moments
of presence at work or forgetfulness of time. This temporal aspect of practice has
nothing anecdotal about it. It allows us to see the music lover as the co-producer
of the work, instead of always assuming that she is an unquestioning admirer, in
mind and body.
Making Something Happen
What does one listen to in a concert? A high level of idealisation, opposing it to

a recording, may have shielded it from a sufficiently critical examination. Once
started, the concert is in no way merely a case of listening to ‘that work’, that
just needs to be listened to as it stands. Concerts do not dispense music, they
are performances, in the sense that they make something happen. At the start,
there is no music, just sceptical, weary or indulgent spectators hesitating over their
desire, watching for organisational slip-ups, keeping one eye on the auditorium
and another on their watch. There is a feeling of resistance, fundamental in
determining whether one allows oneself (or not) to be carried away by the
music. At one moment, the music may pass through the soloist’s body instead of
tripping over it, and we are now concentrating on the way he is playing the work.
Occasionally, we forget the technique, hearing something new in a work that, as
the expression goes, we thought we knew inside-out. At times one is opposed to
one’s neighbours’ enthusiasm; at others one is deliciously transported by shared

enthusiasm; a moment of challenge, where what counts is that the unexpected
can happen, that one likes what one thought one did not like; the aficionado side
of the concert music lover is not snobbery but the truth of this trial: a mixture
of being demanding and blasé, of maintaining deception, of tirelessly hoping for
that moment of feeling overwhelmed; gradually, a performance may surpass the
spontaneous critical assessments that were trying to control it; moments too of
happiness derived from details where, by contrast, it is familiarity with a passage,
a position, a typical moment of what happens in a concert in general, heard
thousands of times over, which guarantees pleasure.
Far from being trivial, the process of creating the right mood for passion,
through all the practices and rituals surrounding the act of listening, must be taken
seriously. This introduces again the paradoxical theme of listening as an activity,
a strange mixture of active and passive (Gomart and Hennion 1999). Listening
is a precise and highly organised activity, but its aim is not to control something
or to achieve a specific goal: on the contrary, its objective is to bring about a
loss of control, an act of surrender. It is not a matter of doing something, but
of making something happen. What should happen is not planned or intentional:
we must allow ourselves to be carried away, moved, so that something can take
place. I have done everything necessary to make something happen but it is
imperative that I do not try to control what does happen. My little actions, my
idiosyncrasies, my rituals, even if they are very active, are ‘meta-actions’, they
affect my environment, my mood, but they cannot help me control what music
can make me feel, which would be the very negation of my passion. ‘It is essential
not to overtake the music.’ When listening to music, music lovers put themselves
in the right physical, spatial and psychological state, the right ‘frame of mind’
to facilitate the gradual onset of passion, without allowing themselves to give in
to it. From time to time, if we have put up an effective resistance, if we have not
allowed ourselves to be self-indulgent, something may happen. This vocabulary of
the aficionado talking about that sublime instant is a theory of mediation in action:
all means are important, it is necessary to use them, to implement them faithfully,
but they do not contain their end, they offer no guarantees, and, conversely, they
are completely engulfed by the sublime moments they may cause to happen.
The result is this constant, characteristic, balancing act between on the one
hand the terms relating to the routine side of the passion for music, isolating and
restrictive terms that conjure up diligent activity, the work of the performer or
the lists and classifications of the collector, idiosyncratic pleasures, methodical
procedures and meticulously organised arrangements, and, on the other, the terms
that conjure up the sudden feelings of surrender, the state of being completely
receptive to whatever might happen, when ‘nothing else counts’.
Taste as a Reflexive Performance
To leave behind an objectivist conception of taste, where it is no more than the

consequence of the physical properties of the objects that cause taste, does not
mean replacing it with a social, ritual or interactive analysis in which belief in the
object replaces the role of first cause that the object itself had before. The previous
analyses aimed to show the opposite: the awkward presence of the object in taste.
What changes our perspective, in the end, the extent to which we acknowledge the
‘responsiveness’ of musical objects: do they make a difference? By being socially
constructed, the object does not cease to exist: on the contrary, it thereby becomes
more present. We cannot keep on alternating indefinitely between natural-linear
interpretations (taste arises from things in themselves) and circular-cultural
interpretations (the objects are what we make of them). It is necessary to get rid
of this ‘zero-sum game’ between the object and the social in order to show how
music lovers project their taste onto things. This takes us out of a dual world (on
the one hand, autonomous but inert things and on the other, pure social signs) to
let us into a world of mediations and effects in which they are produced together,
one by the other, the body that experiences the taste and the taste for the object,
the society which loves and the repertoire of loved objects. Our attachment implies
all this, the body and society, the things and mechanisms, all these are mediators.
They are determinants and the determined at the same time: they determine the
application of taste and restart the whole process.
Taste is clearly a machine that reveals difference, but not in the sense of a
reduction to a known mechanism, an available social order projected onto the
fictive screen of the natural order: in so far as this natural is ungraspable without
procedures. Like the social itself, it is not given. It has to arise, allow itself to
be grasped, and can be experienced only through a practical experiment and a
body that is itself put to the test. This is why taste is always reflexive. It is not
perceiving or feeling on the basis of what one knows, but discovering oneself as
a taster through detailed and repeated contact with that which was not perceived.
Owing to this elaboration (and above all to this presentation most often offered by
other music lovers playing the part of mediators), it is perceiving what one had not
formerly perceived and, at the same time, sensing that one feels others’ feelings.
What great music lovers enable us to see more easily, owing to their high level
of engagement in a particular practice, is a range of social techniques that make
us able to produce and continuously adapt to a creative relationship with objects;
in other words, a pragmatic presence vis-à-vis the world that makes us and that
we make.
Taste, not as independent variables that gather together in order to guarantee
a result but as uncertain mediations that support each other to make states arise,
to bring about responses to objects, to transform beings, to make the moments
that matter coherent. We can dream: and what if sociology were to cease fighting
once and for all against the imaginary power that the objects supposedly hold over
us? And what if, by listening to the music lovers, sociology were to recognise
this power, or in other words, the art of a more intense and reflexive relationship
which, through taste, human beings slowly but surely establish with the objects,
with others, with their bodies and with themselves?
Conclusion
The Representation of Music:
In Praise of Musical Artifice
Why did you come tonight? Well, man, we can play music all night, but that’s not
what you really want, is it? You want something else, something more, something
greater than you’ve ever seen before, right? Well, fuck you. We came to play music!
Jim Morrison, quoted by J. Hopkins and D. Sugerman,
No One Here Gets Out Alive, 1980
Is music primarily for its audience or does it exist for its own sake? Even more
basically, is it a relation, or an object? Current musical forms are torn between two
mutually exclusive representations. For the sake of concision, I have described
the first as linear (the relationship to an object) and the other as circular (a group’s
relationship to itself). The relationship to an object is based on an externalising
principle. Western music, by assuming the construction of an autonomous object,
has created a deep divide between the audience and the work. In this perspective,
the social, technical and aesthetic characteristics of this relationship merely
describe its terms and the forms it takes: since music is a given, the sociologist
may only focus his attention on who consumes it and who does not have access
to it, examine the impact of technology and the media on music, and ponder what
differentiates different aesthetic approaches from each other. In contrast, social
definitions of our relationship to music proceed the other way around. They
internalise the object: they start by positing a social sphere where musical forms
and musicians have their place, exist in correspondence with each other, and are
interchangeable signifiers with a common social signified. In this case, the social
is no longer one of the characteristics of music: instead, the musical is one of the
observable forms of the social relationship. The conflict between aesthetic and
sociological perspectives can also be described as a struggle between two different
nexuses, each of which attempts to position itself as the reference point for the
interpretation of the other by placing it on its axis – they compete with each other
to subsume, rather than be subsumed by, the other.
Aside from the conflict between these two approaches, the representation of
music also intersects with another issue: what is the status of the different elements
of music that must be connected together (musical forms, audiences, music lovers,
identities, etc.)?
Whether its perspective is aesthetic or social, the representation of music may
be based on well-defined entities with clear and measurable characteristics. In this
case, the relationship to music can be understood in terms of the economic model
of supply and demand, through the lens of merchants doing their job, bringing
products and consumers together: musical pieces are classified in catalogues, and
music lovers know these classifications by heart, while an uninterrupted series of
reflexive measures checks and adjusts these correspondences. It does not matter
whether this representation is real or imaginary: what counts is that this founding
representation describes our relationship to music as a functional, external,
relationship, in which products and consumers meet.
Conversely, the representation of music can be based on entities that are
still undefined and on virtual relationships that have not yet been created and/
or noticed. This is done by giving them a material form – subjects are unable to
define themselves outside these mechanisms of representation. Far from a market
model, based on the metaphor of supply and demand between consumers and
goods which are external to each other, this perspective is based on the linguistic
model of representation: the subject or the group find expression through objects,
and neither the subjects nor the objects have any meaning outside this reciprocal,
internal relationship. A Pygmy can immediately tell the ethnic subgroup or ritual
situation suggested by a particular rhythm or instrument, not because he perceives
it as the social characteristic of a musical fact, but because he sees a social fact
being expressed in music (Blacking 2000). A rock ’n’ roll fan watches out for
the signs, ‘the look’, and the sounds of his favourite genre: the fan makes the
music as much as the music makes the fan (Frith 1978, 1981, Hebdige 1979).
The same is true in the case of the object. Both the free jazz enthusiast and the
contemporary Classical music buff know that the object which they seek – the
music being performed in front of them – will forever elude them. By turns
hopeful and disappointed, the aficionado is on a rocky road: he does not consume
concerts, but lives through experiences which must be transformative, while also
destroying past definitions of music and their audiences. For these music lovers,
music does not constitute an external reality – i.e. an object placed in front of
them for their consumption. Instead, they view music as a practice, an ascetic
discipline, an initiation, something that takes them outside themselves and which
allows them, through its objects, to achieve self-expression via others.
The face-to-face relationship between a subject and an object
well-defined entities emerging entities
The circular relationship a group has with itself through an object
Figure C.1 A given world, or a world still to be done?

The Representation of Music: In Praise of Musical Artifice 283
Social Techniques, Objectives Techniques
Music cannot appear in front of us without the convergence of the two ancient
techniques of representation which human beings devised and appropriated in
order to enter into a relationship with things: these are, on the one hand, the social
techniques which a group uses to materialise and project itself in symbols, and, on
the other, the natural techniques it has created to master objects. These differences
are misleading: they have been produced by the disciplines that have sought to
distinguish these techniques from each other, either by endowing things with the
conventional and arbitrary qualities of social signs, or by investing them with the
univocal quality that the physical sciences attribute to natural bodies. Nothing
illustrates better the unsatisfactory nature of these distinctions than a keyboard
or a scale. In order to avoid being caught between the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’
of the position of aesthetics (music without society) and the sociologistic stance
(society without music), we must also challenge another unjustified sociological
blind spot: as well as ignoring the works, sociology also refuses to consider the
technical objects, material media, and instruments on which the endurance of art
depends. The relationships between music and its audiences rely on a multiplicity
of forms or processes which all depend on a wide spectrum of mediations, ranging
from the social to the technical.
Let us begin with social techniques, which we might more aptly call ‘circular
practices’ – i.e. those that are based on the notion that music allows a group to
engage in acts of self-representation: rituals, performances, regulated episodes of
collective excitement, crowd management techniques and the spiritual leaders able
to induce collective trances. This ethnological perspective leads to a Durkheimian
definition of mediation, where the social seeks symbolical expression by projecting
itself onto things, submitting to these representations in order to turn heterogeneous
individuals into an active and unified group. In musical terms, this means looking
at African drums, dance, and the power of physically entrancing rhythms. It also
means studying the stage, the performance and the techniques that bring people
together, as well as the network of discrete, simultaneously isolated and shared,
practices which the masses carry out in their own homes, using modern media. Far
from being as immediate as this primitivist terminology appears to suggest, these
supposedly social representations, which range from concert trances to private
manifestations of enthusiasm, depend on a wide range of objects. At a concert,
these objects include the enclosed space, the staging, the lighting, the musical
instruments. At home, they include the television set, the disc, the stereo system,
the network of shops and specialist publications, the computer. Far from diluting
physical interaction, modern media intensify it and widen its scope.
Let us now turn to natural techniques, that is ‘linear techniques’: those that are
based on the premise that music is akin to a thing that appears in front of us. In
this perspective, what we must do when there is no object in front of us is replicate
it as faithfully as possible, giving a stable material form to what might otherwise
be vulnerable to the passage of time: these practices range from flute bores, the
necks of string instruments, and a few written markers, to entire scores, and indeed
complete recordings. In this technological perspective, the focus of the material
definition of mediation becomes the management of the interface between human
skills and the properties of things, and the former’s increasing mastery over the
latter. Representation is understood as a means of depiction and stabilisation, as a
reprographic technique. In this case too, the attempt to make music into an object
depends at every step on an entire social framework, ranging from the interpreters’
rehearsals to the conventions that govern the interpretation of the traces of music,
and to the techniques used in the cultural industry to turn music into a product that
can be sold.
A Quick Backward Glance at the Reinterpretation of the Baroque
We are confronted once again with the paradox at the heart of the twentieth-
century renewal of Baroque music: its freedom of movement owes everything
to the disc’s capacity to stabilise music; indeed, discs have become this musical
genre’s invisible sphere. Classical musical works are very well classified: one
need only think of catalogues of record labels, complete editions, Mozart years,
or shelves of musical titles sorted according to their genre. The reinterpretation of
Baroque music was made possible by the ‘phonograph’s stereotypical rendition
of sounds’, as Borrel used to say, and the transformation of music into an object
which is there for our delight. This is precisely what J. le Cerf de La Viéville
lamented, in 1705, in his Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique
française, on the grounds that the equal rhythms of the Italians were rather tedious.
This is how he explains why he mourns the lute:
But nowadays they couldn’t perform a concert with a lute. They wish to be
admitted, and be considered of good standing, in the fellowship of Musicians …
Yet the tediousness of the preparations involved, and of listening to instruments
that necessitate an awkward half an hour of tuning, is enough to deter a thousand
[concert going] gentlemen. (pp. 105, 107)
Le Cerf laments the fact that in 30 years’ time, nobody will know how to play
the lute, the French having lost interest in this instrument when they adopted
Italian music – little did he realise that changing tastes and fashions would
prove him wrong 250 years later. To each period its nostalgia: while we value
live performances more than the stereotypical sound of discs, Le Cerf, on the
other hand, felt that concerts had brought about the professionalisation of music,
turning it into a fashionable spectacle, and forgetting the lute’s or the viola’s tender
conversation, and its natural tones … ‘Gentlemen used to allocate to those who
were musicians by birth or by profession the task of performing accompaniments.
Today, this has become a supreme honour’ (ibid., p. 104). Those who performed
accompaniments had become the new masters. ‘Sonata, what do you want from
me?’ Fontenelle’s celebrated apostrophe says the same thing, beyond expressing
the disdain of instrumental music to which it is all too often anachronistically
reduced: more profoundly, it voices the feeling that music should not be an end in
itself, contrarily to what is asserted in the professional and institutional definition
of music by ‘musicians’ – i.e. by valets, according to Le Cerf.
Why are we sensitive again to these newly rediscovered instruments? It is
not a coincidence if the instruments which emblematise the twentieth-century
renewal of Baroque music – the recorder, the viola, the counter-tenor voice,
the harpsichord or the lute – would all be inaudible in great concert halls such
as the Salle Pleyel or the Royal Albert Hall: they were not devised with such
large spaces in mind. Thanks to amplifiers and recordings, however, we are able
to benefit from their antique nuances without sacrificing our modern listening
habits. What we hear today is an artificial instrument. This instrument is not
‘artificial’ in a polemical sense, but in the technical sense of the term: it has an
impossible dynamic. At the end of the nineteenth century, the bodies and sound
posts of period instruments – including Wanda Landowska’s harpsichords – were
routinely reinforced to make them audible. This practice is no longer necessary
today: compact discs have updated the lute, turning it into a concert instrument
by amplifying the subtle and nuanced sound which Le Cerf believed made it the
perfect instrument for the expression of feeling, as opposed to conceited concert
music. One wonders what he would have made of the ‘phonograph’….
Recorded Music, or Music at last Made into an Object
The disc has been powerful enough to introduce modern listeners to musical
repertoires conceived with a different relationship in mind – the Baroque
‘conversation’, but also the rituals of ethnic or religious music. There is a
crucial and ever renewed oscillation between two musical moments – rather
than between different musical forms: a person-to-person relationship, and
a collective allegiance to a shared reality, which finds a stable expression in
objects. Musical props always seek to avoid attracting our attention: the ‘high
fidelity’ that discs strive for seeks to give us access to the music itself. However,
the controversy surrounding the question of what music is emphasises the active
role of these media: the example of Baroque music shows the extent to which
modern media have made it possible for us to hear its period sounds again, by
allowing this music to be redefined as a historical object, but also as a consumer
object. This example illustrates the crucial dimension of physical interaction in
music, which different musical media can alternatively lose and recreate. Every
a new media is created (the recording for us, the concert for Le Cerf), it is at first
accused of killing ‘live’ music by turning it into a mechanical and commercial
product, but it soon becomes the focus of new forms of musical creation. If
today Le Cerf’s fears have come true, in the sense that the musical stage has
morphed into a disc and the concert into a music label – ‘no coughing please’,
‘no fidgeting’: we approach a concert the way we do a disc, in order to hear a

pianist give a performance which is as stilted as his audience and the music he
is playing – this is not because music is dead, but because of the displacement
of the interplay between musical innovations and competing interpretations onto
the recording, the new device which we use to stabilise music.
This device for the stabilisation of music has become a means of production.
Although, if one considers recording, this is a truism in the case of electronic
music, it is no less obvious when it comes to Baroque music. We’ve come full
circle: starting from a history of musical forms which was a little too quick to
appropriate its intermediaries as though they were simply tools, we have moved
towards a history of music written by its media. Music is constituted by the formats
and the materials through which it passes. ‘I love Bach, therefore I buy discs’,
thinks the music lover. The opposite is true. Bach has become Bach because all
the music shops display his work – his music is widely available. Today, music
lovers have become economic players in the market, and owe their existence to
a century of musical ‘discomorphosis’. Not only are recordings enduring and
(relatively) stable, in temporal terms, but large numbers of identical copies of all
recordings are available in music shops and on the Internet: as a result, all of
our musical enthusiasms develop in a well-defined space where titles are clearly
marked and classified according to their genre, making them easy to locate: we
have a miniature playlist inside our head, which echoes the one on our shelves or
computers. The simple, often-repeated and soon forgotten gesture of creating a
recording makes it easy to forget that recordings have fostered an unprecedented
proliferation of music across time and space.1 The status of the recording has
changed. Once considered an external musical intermediary, it has now become
the main modern source of music production, and underpins our relationship to
music conceived as a repertoire of works and a directory of artists, both of which
can dated precisely.
The Axes of Musical Representation
Whether on the music stage or in the media (through recordings), musical

representation unfolds along two axes – the reduction to the social, the production
of the object – which are neither unreal nor illusory.2 Instead, these axes refer to
1
It seems paradoxical to describe digital productions as immaterial on the grounds
that they are coded. Not only does this ignore the enormous technological outlay involved
and suggest a rather limited definition of matter, but it misses the signification of an end
result which makes musical objects more stable than ever.
2
Cf. the arresting Morrison quote in the epigraph: Morrison was so acutely aware of
the ambivalent expectations of his audience that he provocatively returned them the favour –
although by rejecting their desire, he surely reinforced it. The contemporary schism between
popular and art music directly reflects these two mythical musical extremes. G. Born (1988,
the practical modalities which allow representation to be a substitute for presence,

whether this is achieved by the restoration of a face-to-face human encounter
through invisible devices, or by the constitution of a shared supra-human object.
These competing representations have to be allowed to coexist, so that they may
be measured against each other. First of all, this can be done by taking ‘against’ to
imply a challenge – an ‘accusation’ – as this word so often does. Such accusations
always rely on one form of mediation in order to reject others: the spoken word
against writing, ‘live’ performances against studio music, social value against
aesthetics, present tastes against musicology, etc. Thus, contemporary Classical
musicians are accused of not producing works and not having an audience, while
Classical music is deemed to be no more than a petty bourgeois social marker. In
turn, popular music is criticised for not going beyond the frenetic expression of
collective impulses, while mainstream music is condemned for pandering to the
masses …. Indeed, we all tend to level accusations of snobbery or commercialism
at the various types of music that leave us cold. Rather than continuing to contrast
real essences with treacherous mediators, it might be more profitable to admit
that all we can contrast are the various mediators that different musical forms rely
on: these competing mediators are what these different musical forms really are.
When they argue about music, professional musicians and music lovers almost
always focus on its competing modalities: how does music manage to represent?
Does this depend more on collective practices or on musical training? Does it
depend more on how shows are staged or on the transmission of codes and shared
tastes by an initiated milieu? Does it depend more on capturing music, by writing
it down or by recording its sounds, or on the distribution of images? And what
objects, material formats and techniques does this involve? We defend some of
them, on the grounds that they are ‘authentic’, ‘natural’, ‘alive’, and reject others
for being ‘artificial’, ‘mechanical’, ‘commercial’ and ‘passive’.3 In their everyday
conversations, musicians themselves aggressively reject certain mediators: but,
1993) – who once played the bass in a rock band – proceeds from an ethnological study of
IRCAM to an analysis of rock music to demonstrate their reciprocal ignorance.
3
Debates about the technical mediators of music do not involve hierarchical
classifications. Recordings are no more ‘dead’ than written scores or instruments, for
example: denouncing the limitations of Classical music, whether instrumental or written,
electroacoustic music, studio music, and music samplers refuse to subject music to texts
and instrumental virtuosity: taking advantage of the new forms of ‘writing’ made possible
by new ways of recording and creating sound, they privilege sound itself. Devoid of
instruments and written scores, these musical forms have at last managed to get rid of
interpreters, focusing instead on magnetic and digital sound recordings. Similarly, whereas
old blues tunes are oral music, a Coltrane chorus, on the other hand, appears to be a
superlatively written form of music. Indeed, it may be even more written than Classical
music: not so much because it is written down increasingly precisely, but because it has
been fixed in recordings which allow long practice sessions. Discs gave jazz its library:
its living history is the product of mechanical recordings. As has often been remarked, the
stabilisation of music through writing, and then through recordings, did not spell the end
denouncing them for betraying the truth of music, they invoke others, claiming
that they are its faithful servants, while also discreetly resorting to others still,
using them as modest, inconspicuous, tools. (Thus, in the amusing example of
the quarrels surrounding the twentieth-century reinterpretation of Baroque music,
developments in recording technologies quietly fostered developments in the
interpretation of that music.)
However, these competing formats of representation are mostly interdependent:
they all rely on each other. Musical forms do not become affiliated with this or
that mediator according to their genre: instead, they all confirm, develop or reject
each other, through their diverse combinations of various mediators. Each one of
them borrows a lot from the others. They all ‘compose’ with their mediators, even
though this leads them periodically to redefine themselves following a crisis of
identity. Sometimes, they advocate a fusional experience bringing bodies together
(cancelling out instrumental intermediaries). Sometimes, on the contrary, they wish
to avoid this fusional experience by erecting objects between bodies, screening
them off from each other (and turning subjects into the mediators of their own
submission to an ideal music that is always just beyond their reach). Drawing
out these two axes of representation – music-for-music’s-sake (the object is all-
important) and music-is-for-the-audience (human beings are what matters) – makes
music much more open-ended. It is no longer a matter of arguing that the nature
of music can only be one of two things, which are the result of two diametrically
opposed strategies: the promotion of the musical object, and the creation of fusional
collective experiences. Moreover, these representations, in the strong sense of the
term, do not constitute symmetrical ideologies, where the quest for idols or for the
sublimation of the work disguises the fact that our passions are being manipulated
by very similar commercial imperatives. Instead, these differently orientated axes
are to be understood in the mathematical sense of the term: between them, they
create a space in which the actual elements which compose various musical forms
can be situated and defined. This allows these musical forms to take possession of
these elements and to transform them: integrating the human beings and the things
they need into the world that they create according to their model of representation,
these axes turn them into music lovers and works, fans and idols, musical
connoisseurs and a musical repertoire, goods and a market, artists and audiences.
This makes it possible to restore the mediators of the musical world. The
geography of these ‘accusations’ allows us to move on from the sociological
dilemma of representation, neither accepting the theoretical realism which
privileges an external representation created by the sociologist over the actors’ own
attempts to create representations, nor accepting the naive realism which confuses
the attempts that actors make to represent their world with a straightforward factual
account. Existing musical forms no longer need to fear that reductive interpretations
will either pin them to one of these two axes of representation, or denounce their
of music as a practice of the body: on the contrary it gave these practices the freedom to
become music – as opposed to a mere complement to our social rites.
own identification with one of them: they are erected around the interaction of their
elements on these two perpendicular axes – sounds, instruments, scores, musicians,
recordings, media, music lovers, etc. The space opened up by these two axes
does not curtail our analytical investigations, but instead invites us to start again
every time. There is little point in trying to be exhaustive by trying to enumerate
all the mediators of music, as though it were possible to create a complete list:
this would merely reduce them once again to useful intermediaries, the means to
an end. Instead, I seek to unstitch the fabric of music in various places, in order
to observe the innumerable small links which hold music and musicians together
being undone and recreated at each one of these points of intersection, from the
capture of the mind to the training of the body, and from the creation of institutions
to the stable form that things give to music. Musicians know how to move between
the routines of everyday life and the trance-like performances during which they
summon the scattered elements of their musical practice. Individual case studies
are necessary to see how, within a given musical form, things and human beings
go back and forth between one state and the next, oscillating between immobilised
bodies and mobilised feelings, consolidated external relations and internalised
reciprocal definitions; to understand how musicians are constituted by their
confrontation with their objects, as they go from challenging a small detail of their
identity to overhauling it completely; how they repeat the time-honoured rituals of
a stable world, or on the contrary reactivate their passions when their lethargy is
denounced by some new prophet; how they gradually endow the elements of their
world with their properties through their daily work, or on the contrary rethink
all these elements in an exceptional ceremony which has the power to bind them
together retroactively.
From Accusation to Mediation
‘I love Bach’: the accusative gives the subject its object complement. This
grammatical structure illustrates the balance of the musical relationship, which
turns music into a thing and musicians into a cause.4 Accusation, that is, making
something into a ‘cause’ to fight, or causation, projecting causal reasons into
some thing (‘chose’, in French, from the Latin cosa): this series of substitutions
4
Accusative, ad causam: in our discussion of solfège, cf. p. 242, we already evoked
the anthropological possibilities of the etymological link between accusation, which
questions the causes of things, and the opposite operation, which transforms a cause into a
thing. Tracing our shared ‘res’, from the Classical re-public to modern re-ification, M. Serres
(1987) has shown that words (whether the Latin res, the English thing, the German Ding,
or the French chose) always go back and forth between a human group which has been
brought together by its accusations and which projects itself into various objects, and the
apparition of ‘the thing itself’. In other words, anthropology must learn to make space
for things.
suggests how it might be possible to move back and forth between a world that
is dual – divided between human beings, on the one hand, and things, on the
other – to a world composed of hybrids which holds together because it is neither
constituted by a relationship between human beings which bypasses objects, nor
by a relationship to an object which bypasses human beings (Latour 1991). A
model gives meaning to a situation through the properties attributed to its various
actors. This attribution makes it possible to transform what would otherwise
merely be a series of contingent facts, into an event: that is, into a series of
causes and effects, which can be interrupted if there are obstacles in its path. This
composition or ‘causation’ of reality5 involves a process which is invisible when
everything concurs, all the participants unanimously agreeing on what is going on.
However, this process transforms into its etymological double – accusation6 – as
soon as there are several competing versions of what is happening. Every actor
struggles to impose his reasons, denounce those of the other, challenging their
validity, revealing different interests (commercial, identity, snobbery, distinction,
etc.) behind the reasons stated. Sociology thrives on such denunciations. Then,
implicit models are incorporated into a hybrid, realistic, formulation, obscuring
them by taking their place, each actor retaining the right to their innermost beliefs
once the debate has settled and compromise has been reached on the status of art.
More generally, I have sought to show how one may evoke a phenomenon
through a theory of mediation which defines it not as a state, but as an oscillation
between two stable but ideal states, which are reached by denouncing certain
intermediaries, and are interconnected through a dual reversal:
• An external face-to-face encounter with music, which reduces all its

mediators to mere screens. On this axis, intermediaries are subservient: they
are caught in a linear representation which moves between the audience
and its object/music.
• The elevation of an external shared ideal object, towards which subjugated
subjects gravitate, much as a community of the faithful towards their God.
On this axis, mediators are subjected, and transformed from the inside.
Linear intermediaries, circular mediators. Representation, re-presentation: having

disqualified a particular version of reality through various causes/accusations, two
new ways of reconstructing reality are created through its representation. Two
contradictory and closely interdependent ways of transforming music from a
prosaic, heterogeneous and discontinuous, set of daily events, into a single, all-
encompassing, representation, which unifies them retroactively, endowing them
with their meaning and their place, and making them belong to the same world.
5
Certeau phrases this more elegantly when he speaks of the ‘inversion of what can
be thought’ (1988, p. 137).
6
This is not only true of distant etymologies: ‘mettre en cause’, in modern French,
implies an accusation, as much as the search for a cause.
From the floorboards of the concert stage to the long chain of the objects of music,
these concrete devices are modes of realisation, that is, of retroactive validation:
they are the vanishing points suggested by the two axes of the social group and
the object. Their opposition reveals less the differences between actual musical
genres, than the two modes of summons which call for music to be represented
as it goes back and forth between them. This dual oscillation destroys the plane
geometry of the two axes of representation which I initially delineated, where
actual musical forms merely had to be positioned. Instead, these are turned into
states always on the verge of permutation.
Beyond the opposition between the object and the social, the dual modalities
of the causal process discovered in a particular state of the world may thus be
referred to as linear intermediaries and circular mediators. This is the deeper
question underpinning the hypothesis of mediation: in other words, the means
create the ends. Reality is always the product of an oscillation between two dual
modes of causality which are antithetic to each other, one of them being internal
and the other external. In one of these modes, precedence is given to the elements,
to be connected together like points on a grid, whereas in the other these elements
are perceived as the product of the relationships that interconnect them. Hence
my borrowing of the word ‘dual’ from the language of mathematical analysis.
The very same space is sometimes understood as a set of points on a grid, and
sometimes as a set of relationships:
• Sometimes, it is understood as an external, shared, world, filled with

autonomous entities (the artist and his talent, the audience and their tastes,
etc.), which are external to each other, and must be connected together
through certain channels: i.e. purely instrumental intermediaries, lacking
all substance.
• Sometimes, it is perceived as an internal, in-between, world devoid of
clear frontiers, where nothing is a priori endowed with an identity or fixed
characteristics: instead, the elements of this world are defined through their
interactions, in their active participation in constitutive operations.
The world has become strange, it is full of hybrid beings. The musical worlds
that we inhabit are not clear-cut, but filled with strange entities endowed with
varying statuses, neither fully human, nor fully material: in the case of music,
they are particularly numerous, ranging from sounds to media, instruments, scores
and texts, and from interpreters, repertoires, tastes and genres, to recordings
and institutions, etc. All of these complex, hybrid, intermediaries operate in
between the stabilisation of music onto things (which demands minimal human
participation) and the training of musicians (which requires maximal human
investment). However, we can only make sense of them by oscillating between
thinking that things and human beings (conceived in the most external, linear
sense) are interconnected by effective but passive intermediaries, and that subjects
and objects (conceived in the most internal, circular sense) are linked together
by mediations which have actively been agreed upon. Actual musical forms are
constantly being shuttled back and forth between an external state where music
exists and summons its various actors, and an internal state where it must on the
contrary be brought to life, and where its various elements must summon it into
their midst. Trances, those moments when we are ‘hooked’ by music, episodes
of collective excitement, the illumination of the converted: all these describe the
transition between the external and the internal models, when mediators become
active. On the contrary, the painstaking work of developing theoretical, historical
or aesthetic definitions of the elements of music, the methodical classification of
the objects produced, the stabilisation of the market, the technical training of the
body, correspond to the transition between the internal and the external models of
music, where intermediaries are neutralised.
Music is a Form of Sociology
This notion of duality leads us towards another, dynamic, model, allowing us to

move on from the previous model, where two perpendicular axes opened up a grid
where realist assumptions allowed various musical forms to be plotted, creating a
first image of these musical forms. In this new model, the axes of representation
(social truth, musical truth) are no longer the external markers of a general system
of reference where the statistical coordinates attributed to each musical form
merely depend on whether a particular music tends more towards the interaction of
bodies or towards the object. Instead, these axes become the internal and localised
modalities of the efforts at self-definition, extension, and stabilisation of each
musical world. This is what I make of Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ (1982),7
at the risk of altering his own definition of the term: there is no global space that
might be the space of music. Just like musicians, we can only have access to music
by entering into one of these art worlds, or ‘pockets’, actual musical forms being
akin to Einstein’s ‘reference-molluscs’. As they bring things and human beings
together, and as they interweave them with each other, musical forms manage to
create a shell strong enough to retain their elements, yet flexible enough to be able
to develop, change and adhere to larger constructs – and erect the axes of their
representation. All we can analyse are transformations, and the capacity of these
transformations to conserve something. We always start from such a ‘pocket’ – i.e.
7
Interactionist theories only take into account one half of the actors’ picture of the
world: the one which represents a linear and carefully compiled sum of actual relationships,
never granting it the right to become circular by allowing on the contrary all their everyday
relationships to be redefined according to a general foundational and fusional principle. In
this collective construct, things are merely pretexts, props, markers of human action: as in
‘doing things together’ (yet another felicitous title chosen by Becker for his work (1986)),
the emphasis is on togetherness and collective achievements, less on created things, and not
at all on what things may be able to achieve.
from an inert sum of things, objects, intermediaries, etc. – in order to discover what
local operations challenge or reactivate, mobilise or transport these inert elements,
reuniting them in a representation which leads to a new configuration, which itself
will soon end up becoming an inert sum of things, objects, signs, etc. This is what
the interpreters of Baroque music taught us when their differing views on the
way in which two different centuries should be connected together forced them to
produce mutually exclusive definitions of music, together with the comprehensive
series of mediators which these definitions relied on, ranging from the finer points
of historical musicology to freer assertions on the contemporary tastes of music
lovers, and from considerations on pitch and instruments to the disc market.
Rather than focusing on one of the dual axes of representation, it therefore seems
more apt to use the word ‘mediation’ to describe the dual model of representation
which I am proposing: as we survey the interlocking realities which are all we have
access to, starting from them and ending with them, we go back and forth between
the representations which we create, switching between privileging relationships
over objects (relationships > objects) and objects over relationships (objects >
relationships). We are constantly substituting one for another, as we confront
heterogeneous, complex and divided states of reality, closing some of their options
in order to create and stabilise the fixed markers of our space, in order to question
it, and opening others in order to develop, adapt and mobilise ourselves, calling
ourselves into question. There are two key aspects to this process: the inscription
of a reality into things, which allows the inert states which exist between different
representations to transmit enough elements to enable their reactivation, and the
status of mediators, in the broad sense of the term, which can variously disappear
behind the natural phenomena which they establish among us, or on the contrary
appear in order to challenge them. In order to hold together, music must be poised
between these two states. Music relies equally on mediators to take it back and forth
from one space to another, and to stabilise it into objects by being able to project it
into passing elements, giving them enough content to allow a new state to take over
from an earlier one, and create music anew.
I am not proposing a form of relational sociology, which merely asserts that
the objects are suffused with the social. This is not the issue. The problem with
relational sociology is that it grants the sociologist the right to undo the object in
order to attribute it to other forces, which supposedly hold it together. Relational
sociology goes beyond its own programme: not content with asserting that the
social is woven into the object, it also implies that the object as a thing, cannot
stand alone apart from its social determinants. Conversely, discourses that focus
on objects ultimately ignore the contexts, conditions, relationships and other
circumstances which have created the object in the name of what they believe truly
and deeply holds it together – its truth, or beauty. In other words, both perspectives
will only consider ‘pure’ explanatory causes.
In contrast with relativistic (nothing follows from anything else) and
sociologistic (objectivity is merely what sociologists reveal lying behind the
pretext-objects of actors) sociological discourses, the sociology of mediation takes
the inscription of our relationships into things seriously, without allowing itself
to unravel the physical and social set ups and devices that establish this state of
affairs, as if they were not significant, in order to end up with an autonomous
object on the one hand, and a public open to sociological analysis on the other.
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 emphasise
the irreversible, hybrid constructs which are interspersed between human beings,
between things, and between human beings and things: and what is music if not
that?
Epilogue
‘Vor deinen Thron’…
Music is man described to man in the language of things.

P. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 1966, p. 662
I have said that music is a form of sociology: this is on the condition that this
sociology agrees to be comprehensive, integrating within the human community
the objects that bring people together, with their various levels of resistance,
instead of sometimes reducing them to hot air (considering them the lure of
subjects at the mercy of their illusions, and undoing them without encountering
any resistance) or, depending on the argument, reducing them to the external
stop gap of the social (considering them to hold a natural knowledge which must
merely be acknowledged).
In order to restore the mediators of the world of music, I have emphasised
the means of the musical relationship over its terms – i.e. the works themselves
and the audience. This was the price to pay in order to start developing an
initial argument in favour of mediation. However, the reasons for this strategy
were merely tactical, or disciplinary: both the disciplines that side with objects
(aesthetics and musicology) and those that side with the subject (psychology and
sociology) connived at ignoring intermediaries in order to focus on their chosen
causes. It was important to change the focus of the discussion from the extremes
of representation to representation itself: i.e. from a work and its audience to
what brings them together. In this epilogue, I would like to propose two future
lines of research: far from disqualifying the work and its audience, the theory of
mediation should also endow them with a new content. This is neither a matter
of advocating a return to a universal philosophically or empirically based subject
of taste, or to the work, conceived as the single point of application of aesthetic
analyses of beauty or of the historical research of musicologists. Instead, I wish the
analysis to combine investigation of the music lover as the subject of his passion,
with that of the musical works as beautiful things, together with the intermediary
devices which bring them together. Music and its listeners are both the product of
a situation, and are both dependent on the places, the moments, and the objects
which present them to each other, through the devices and the mediators which
produce them, relying on the presence of others, the instruction of participants, the
training of bodies, and the use of objects. This theory reinforces and enriches them
both. It does not cancel them.
In terms of the audience, it is not my wish to go back to subjecting art to its
ancient functions. On the contrary, I want to continue to liberate it: although art
is now more autonomous, the autonomy of the audience is in contrast still in its
infancy. I have started to develop this line of thought in my inquiry on music
lovers. Whether we focus on the way recordings have completely overhauled

the way a music lover listens to music, look at the amateur instrumentalist’s
struggles with his own limitations, examine the collective enthusiasm of concert-
goers, or analyse the constitution of a musical repertoire or the construction of
personalised ‘lists’ through the media, we seek to rehabilitate the notion that the
listener experiences feelings, emotions, enthusiasm and pleasure and to focus our
investigation on the specific forms that the passion for music takes depending on
the situation. Analysing the actual situations in which music is produced does not
put an end to the object/society dualism, which is itself also a category created by
the actors, in particular when it comes to evoking the wonderful moment when
music is suddenly wholly present, or the collective frenzy when nothing matters
anymore, not even the music. Similarly, analysing the actual situations in which
music is produced does not solve the hotly debated conflict between the definition
of music as an enduring, quasi-‘visual’ work of art – the score – and its definition
as a performance that unfolds in the present moment and movement, and feeds
off the enthusiasm of its audience. What such an analysis does, however, is bring
these questions into proportion: the relationship to the object, the experience of
belonging to a group, are particular modes of relationship, during which self-
effacing mediators leave us ‘in the presence’ of music, or ourselves – which
can just as easily happen in a ‘live’ concert as while listening to a recording, or
performing a piece.
This completely changes the analytical method. Rather than opposing
essentialist definitions of art, music, audiences or culture, to each other, the
analysis focuses on actual situations, and the controversies, debates, negotiations
and compromises between mediators who alone can give us access, in the most
empirical sense, to the way in which actual musical usages gradually come into
being (because mediators constantly rely on intermediaries in order to define
principles, and on principles in order to evaluate intermediaries). Conversely,
these usages are all active: the rehabilitation of the listener can only be a good
thing, whereas taking him out of the work’s set up can only be a loss.
And the Work Itself?
… And the work itself? Will it forever be the taboo of the sociology of art? My
reply is the same as for the listener: there is no work beyond its context; the work is
itself mediation, capturing and presenting a listener through its devices. However,
this reply is more difficult for a sociologist to articulate, and more unusual.
Without wishing to claim that I have accomplished the task myself, I would like
in conclusion to show that this pathway is possible, once the problematics of
mediation has been broached, and that it allows us to analyse the works in a much
fuller way than if we enclosed them within an autonomous aesthetic – we already
have the model, that of the analyses of painting which I have presented. I do not
wish to make the work dissolve among its social mediations, which would lead us
‘Vor deinen Thron’… 297
back to the same dualism of object versus society. But I would wish to show that,
however deeply we plunge our analysis into the heart of music, we still find the
work of mediation: there is no limit beyond which music would be music alone,
and the work finally a self-contained object; from programmes to works, from
works to forms, languages, themes and even scales and sounds, music is a passage
between passages. At the end of our study we find the most profound definition of
music, that of music itself as mediation. What does music signify? This is not the
question of the signification of music, which semiologists ‘of’ music formulate as
they launch into an absurd quest for some referent unavailable to those who stay
at the first degree of representation, at the aliquot per aliquot: for there we avoid
the Charybdis of posies of flowers and love everlasting only to fall into the arms of
the Scylla of circular self-reference. What we need to understand is the semiology
of music, in the active rather than the passive sense of the preposition ‘of’: that is,
the semiology imposed by music. What better way to recall the interpretation of
ancient sounds and instruments, of ornamentation or inequality, than by aligning our
analysis with those which, for painting and literature, have shown the importance
of the double game of dissimulation and retention of traces of the enunciation in
what is enunciated? The pragmatics of enunciation has already for us displaced
the object of analysis, from the ‘effect’ of communication – the weakest and most
linear model – to the reappearance of active interlocutors, as much in the emission
as in the reception of meaning. Semiology is obsessed with the omnipresence of
the central problem of mediation, that of the oscillation between the internal and
the external, between the inclusion, even if only virtual, in the text of the captive
subject, or the expulsion outside the text of the reader with his heterogeneity, who
schemes, deflects and disguises. So it is not then in vain that our analyses have
so often approached those of semiology, with its ways of being interested less in
what is being represented than in the operation of representation, and its search for
traces of enunciation in what is enunciated: deictic, linguistic and other markers
(‘I mean …’, ‘you know’, etc.) – with its subjects and responses, its canons and
repetitions, its leitmotifs or its gimmicks, music is full of all this.
Semiology has perhaps not so much sought to explain the miracle of the
possibility of reference, specific to language, as show on the contrary the work
of representation that precedes any designation. Then the parallel between music
and language appears clearly: to represent is not to show – that is the basics. Nor
is it only to show that one is showing, following in the footsteps of the pragmatics
of enunciation – which is already a richer path to follow. Representation, if we
no longer think of it in the positivistic sense which semiology leads us tentatively
towards – one thing standing for another, something present for something
absent – refers us back to theological models of generalised mediation, such as
those analysed by L. Marin (1975) or M. de Certeau (1988, 1987), which show the
impossibility of this equivalence, and opt for a positive representation of absence.
To represent is not to show that one shows, but to show that one does not show.
This is what contemporary painting does, and in order to do so it has to

‘musicalise’ itself, return to the performance, to the person interpreting it,1 at a
time when contemporary music is plunged in the physics of sound, and finds in
acoustics and computing the scientific basis which the plastic arts have so gleefully
abandoned! The comparison between music and painting is unravelled here, in
terms of depth and representation. Music meets painting at point where they had
met before, but moving in the other direction;2 it is the point where human beings
and things separate and join. This phenomenon is repeated again and again in
the perspective paintings of the Quattrocento according to Marin (1989). This
does not imply, as traditionally interpretations would have it, the appearance
of a perspective space finally homogeneous and objective as the reduction of a
previously symbolic depth; on the contrary it is a technique highly fine-tuned to
allow the interlocking, irreducible intermediary spaces to proliferate between that
of the spectator, that of the spectator in pictura, that of the pictorial technique, that
of the storia represented, that of the truth and devotion intended to be fostered,
that of the divine presence. More generally, it is the monstrance of a lack. Not
in using something present to show something missing – one thing standing for
another – but showing absence as presence, the absence of a body removed from
its active representation, the body present and regained, the desire of God.3 ‘He
is no longer here’ is not a negative phrase. This ‘body removed from the fable of
the narrative and granted to discourse’ (p. 127) is the point of departure of the
representation. From it proceed institutions and rites: not opacities, fetishising the
thing present in place of the thing missing, but realisation of the lack which founds
faith, the positive desire for a divine body lost, a displacement of the real lives of
1
The ‘artist with no works’ described by Moulin (1978, p. 249). Lévi-Strauss treated
non-figurative painting as ‘a school of academic painting in which each artist strives to
represent the manner in which he would execute his pictures if by chance he were to paint
any’ (2004, note p. 30). As is often the case, if we overlook its aggressive tone, the sarcasm
reveals a hidden truth.
2
According to Serres (1987), cf. supra, p. 209. Marin finds another mythological
movement from seeing to telling, via the severed head of John the Baptist, his ‘eyes closed
and mouth open’, the antithesis of the Medusa and her fascinating gaze which inhibits
speech, whereas the Saint is ‘a desire for presence which it is the impossible aim of
representation to achieve’ (1989, p. 184).
3
Whence the importance of the Annunciations (pp. 125–63, those scenes paradigmatic
of the Renaissance, between two mediators who pass the baton to each other as witness of
an absence, where ‘the women receive from the Angel the news of this lack’ (p. 126). Marin
reveals in his detailed analyses that painting is always representation of a representation,
a way of achieving the presence of the invisible: for instance, that the Annunciations are
empty, in the middle, and that their perspective is focused on this absence; or again, that if
we sketch the plan of Piero’s Annunciation (p. 158), we notice that a column prevents the
Virgin from seeing the Angel who is shown opposite her in the painting.
the Apostles into the Sacred Writing.4 From the idol to the icon there is the crucial
transition which separates the ‘as if’ of an absence denied by representation (in the
weak sense of the term), and the presence of absence achieved by representation
(in the strong sense of the term).5
Now this collective effort to make the movement triggered by absence and
the desire that it provokes, veer away from targeting an external object into
which we project, in order to make it our own, internal law, and drive it towards
infinite history, writing and interpretation, this is what music is. It is not because
it resists semiology, or because it mounts a challenge which must at all cost be
countered, that music interests semiology, and vice versa. It is because, faced with
the terrible twins of representation representing, and representation represented,
the semiologist’s movement travels from the former to the latter, meeting the
movement of the painter, which travels the opposite route, from the painting-as-
thing to painting-as-act. This is what music is – it is the collective formulation of
a lack, thus transformed into the designation of an inaccessible object, the quest
for which organises at one and the same time our subjection and the common
construction of an object, a collective compromise which we reach in order to
inscribe within things the absence which this object represents (that is to say
both the impossibility of a pure referent, an object which would be the source of
everything, immediately; and at one and the same time the simultaneous absence
of a collective which could immediately represent itself in emblems).
‘The linguistic status of the musical is such that it has to be heard first
before it may be understood, and this takes more than one person. Is this not
interesting?’ (Schaeffer 1966, p. 646). This is a collective effort to produce an
increasingly elusive object, which constantly needs reinterpreting. Icon versus
idol. A proliferation of mediators and ‘interpretants’6 versus determination of a
fixed point of reference. Substitution of the act of representation for the thing
represented. Not to show that one is showing, but to show that one is not showing.
Not to present a work, but to represent its absence, indicate the energy that it calls
forth.7 Such is music. And that is what allows us to undertake an open analysis,
directed towards the works that have been left for us, linking their meaning to
the ways in which they have structured our presence within them, instead of
congealing them in an absolute position finally rid of listeners and means of
4
Cf. de Certeau (1987); Marin (1981) analysed in the same terms the politico-
theological representation of absolute monarchy, ‘the king really present only attains his
absolute power by becoming his image, by signing his name’.
5
E. Sendler, in a study of the theology, the aesthetics and the technique of the icon,
notes that the iconoclastic opposition has always been a theological opposition to the
mystery of the incarnation, that is, to the ‘presence of the invisible’ (1988, p. 39).
6
Where more than in music do we need the notion of ‘unlimited semiosis’, which Eco
(1976, p. 69) coined in his discussion of Peirce?
7
These are the terms chosen by É. Souriau in 1956: he speaks of the ‘call of the work’
(2009, p. 211).
transmission. The works are themselves mediation, they themselves also contain
within themselves their listeners and their means of transmission – that is what
makes them our contemporaries.
‘Before Thy throne’…
In his Essais de musicologie (1980, pp. 43–5), faithful to a conception of music

as commentary on the Scriptures, which are themselves already mediation,
A. Schaeffner gives an ample extended paraphrase of a page by A. Pirro on Bach:
‘How to play Bach on the organ?’ (1932). Let us conclude with this commentary
on a commentary:
“Seated at his organ, he was like a preacher at the pulpit, with the same intentions”.
These were the last pages that Pirro wrote on Bach. Here we find all the features
of an art conditioned by the function that it fulfills and by the material resources
at its disposal. It all goes to place Bach in the posture of the participant in a ritual,
an official celebrant. Even the appeal to a musical symbolism, even if it remains
hermetic to the common flock, and perhaps because it does remain so, proceeds
from a formulation both allusive and formulaic which we may find elsewhere,
in almost any ritual … To this medieval mind the organ spoke [Schaeffner’s
emphasis] … However different the material and spiritual conditions might be,
Bach, at the organ, comes close to the conditions of primitive religious music:
on the one hand he obeys certain conventions; on the other, his knowledge of
the sacred texts leads him to base his musical paraphrase on certain elements
of vocabulary whose exact meaning he is perhaps alone in grasping, but which
he none the less fixes, and which he invents as much as he borrows. That this
language is difficult to understand and requires an initiation, is not a negative
argument; this might surprise a musicologist, but the ethnologist is unperturbed.
What is important is that Bach, officiating at his organ, establishes or tends to
establish a network of correspondences between the sacred texts and the musical
formulae, some of which were part of the conventions of the age. At least it
was a state of unstable equilibrium, for in one direction one might fall into the
effusions of a music which … entertains no relationship with the liturgy … in
the other direction, it is impossible to outperform the liturgy itself, a work which,
just like popular music, is collective, and although it does not exclude personal
creativity on principle, it does subordinate it to so many rules and regulations,
that in fact nothing can prevent its main characteristic from being a general and
anonymous style.
Bach never made music, in the way that we understand this in the twentieth
century. He decorated texts to summon the faithful. ‘Soli Deo Gloria’, he writes at
the end of his scores. He writes neither for the public, nor for the sake of art (our
two modern motives, in harmonious opposition). Nor is it the case that his music
is abstract, in the equally modernist sense that he might have freed himself from
the contingent mediations of the production of the music limited to its place and
period, instruments and interpreters, burgermeisters and bourgeoisie, in order to
remove it into a timeless sphere. There is no greater misunderstanding. It is true
that between immediacy on the one hand, and the open-ended accumulation of
endless mediations, the frontier is paradoxically narrow. Bach is the latter, not the
former. Let us organise and rehearse the enormous range of the paraphernalia of
musical means – and of liturgy, text and ceremony – and in so doing our efforts
will ring to the praise of God. Bach wants to make Him appear within us – not
before us. Music is the reign of mediation, an undoubting St Thomas, music is the
bliss of those who believe without seeing: music is the state of grace.
‘Before Thy Throne’ was supposedly dictated by the blind, dying Bach,
repeating a chorale that he had already ornamented, making of it a perfectly
peaceful music, which follows the pace of regularly mounting a step, before
coming to rest back at the point of departure. G G A B, A B C B A, G. Where does
meaning find its end, where does our musical analysis take its point of departure?
The theme twice repeats the passage and its return: A B C repeats G A B one step
higher, but this Beethovian cell of three ascending steps is itself the repetition of
an even simpler cell, the passage from one note to the next higher note (G A, A
B), whose theme itself is an ornament (G A B, A B C). De Certeau noted that, by
repeating their syllables twice, the words of the infant (pa-pa, ma-ma, wee-wee,
poo-poo) indicated at the very moment of their articulation that they were words
and not just sounds: Bach, too, stammers, he too chants his Alpha Beta of music.
He first repeats one note, then links it to the next, then repeats this sequence. On
the frontier of death, he shows how music is born. Music rises forth not from a
theme, not from a cell, nor even from a single note, but from something that does
not exist: the void that lies between two sounds. Music is this passage.8
G G A B. How serene is this modest movement needing no object, and entirely
inhabited by this lack: before Thy throne, I shall appear.
8
Singers, for whom nothing is harder to intone than the tone, know this; as do
pianists, who, having to play very fluently, feel not that they are depressing separate keys,
but moving across the imaginary little fence which seems to separate one from another.
Bibliography
ADDEC and SER (1985) L’Économie du spectacle vivant et l’audiovisuel,

Actes du colloque international de Nice, 15–16 October 1984. Paris: La
Documentation française.
Adler, Judith E. (1979) Artists in Offices: An Ethnography of an Academic Art
Scene. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1945) ‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’, reprinted in The
Kenyon Review, Summer/Fall 1996, 18(3–4), pp. 229–35.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton.
London: Continuum.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1983) Prisms (Studies in Contemporary German Social
Thought). Translated by S. Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; orig. 1967.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1992) Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London and New York: Verso; orig. 1963.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1996) Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. Translated by
Edmund Jephcott. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; orig. 1960.
Adorno, Theodor W. (2004) Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.
London: Continuum; orig. transl. 1984; orig. 1970.
Adorno, Theodor W. (2005) In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney
Livingstone. London and New York: Verso and NLB; orig. transl. 1981;
orig. 1938.
Adorno, Theodor W. (2006) Philosophy of New Music. Translated by Robert
Hullot-Kantor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; transl. 1976;
orig. 1949.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Eisler, Hans (1947) Composing for the Films. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. et al. (eds) (1975) Présences d’Adorno. Paris: Revue
d’Esthétique and UGE.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Translated by John Cumming. London: Verso; orig. 1944.
Akrich, Madeleine (1986a) ‘Le Jugement dernier. Une sociologie de la beauté’,
L’Année sociologique, 36, pp. 239–77.
Akrich, Madeleine (1986b) ‘Le Polyptyque de Beaune: La construction locale
d’un universel’, in Moulin (ed.) (1986a), pp. 425–30.
Akrich, Madeleine (1992) ‘The De-Scription of Technical Objects’, in W. Bijker
and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology and Building Society: Studies in
Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 205–24.
Albrecht, M.C., Barnett, J.H. and Griff, M. (eds) (1970) The Sociology of Art and
Literature: A Reader. London: Gerald Duckworth.
Alibert, J.-L. (1982) ‘Dix-neuf heures de musique par jour: Les fonctions de
France-Musique‘. Doctoral dissertation, Université de Grenoble III.
Alpers, Svetlana (1983) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth
Century. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Alpers, Svetlana (1988) Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; French translation: (1991) L’Atelier
de Rembrandt. Translated by Jean-François Sené. Paris: Gallimard.
Alsop, Joseph W. (1982) The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and
its Linked Phenomena Wherever They Have Appeared. New York: Harper & Row.
Antal, Frederick (1948) Florentine Painting and its Social Background: The
Bourgeois Republic before Cosimo de Medici’s Advent to Power: XIVth and
Early XVth Centuries. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Anthony, James R. (1997) French Baroque Music from Beauxjoyeulx to Rameau.
London and Huddersfield: Amadeus Press; orig. (1973) London: B.T. Batsford.
Arian, Edward (1971) Bach, Beethoven and Bureaucracy: The Case of the
Philadelphia Orchestra. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Arom, Simha (2004) African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Structure and
Methodology. Translated by Raymond Boyd, Martin Thom and Barbara
Tuckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; orig. trans. 1991; orig. 1985,
Polyphonies et polyrythmies instrumentales d’Afrique Centrale: Structure et
méthodologie. Paris: SELAF.
Arvon, Henri (1970) L’Esthétique marxiste. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Assouline, Pierre (1988) L’Homme de l’art: D.H. Kahnweiler, 1884–1979.
Paris: Balland.
Attali, Jacques (1985) Noise: Political Economy of Music (Theory and History
of Literature). Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press; orig. (1977) Bruits, essai sur l’économie politique de la
musique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Austin, John L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhaïl M. (1990) Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays,
ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translation and notes by
Vadim Liapunov. Supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Banfield, Edward C. (1984) The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public
Interest. New York: Basic Books.
Barbelin, Hervé and Hennion, Antoine (1986) ‘Désaccords parfaits: France-
Musique et la fabrication du goût’, Vibrations, 3, pp. 132–57.
Barral i Altet, Xavier (ed.) (1986/88/90) Artistes, artisans et production artistique
au Moyen Age, Actes du Colloque international, Rennes II, 2–6 and 5 and 83,
vol.1: Les hommes, vol.2: Commande et travail, vol.3: Matières et techniques.
Paris: A. & J. Picard.
Bibliography 305
Bastide, Roger (1977) Art et société. Paris: Payot.

Bateson, Gregory (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in
Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1968) Le Système des objets. Paris: Gallimard.
Baudrillard, Jean (1972) Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe.
Paris: Gallimard.
Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society: Myth and Structures. Translated
by Chris Turner. London: Sage Publications; orig. (1970) La Société de
consommation: Ses mythes, ses structures. Paris: SGPP.
Baumol, William J. and Bowen, William G. (1966) Performing Arts: The Economic
Dilemma. A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baxandall, Michael (1971) Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of
Painters in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (1350–1450).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baxandall, Michael (1980) The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany,
New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.
Baxandall, Michael (1988) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy:
A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University
Press; orig. 1972.
Beaud, Paul and Willener, Alfred (1973) Musique et vie quotidienne. Tours: Mame.
Beaussant, Philippe (1988) Vous avez dit ‘baroque’? Musique du passé, pratiques
d’aujourd’hui. Arles: Actes Sud.
Becker, Howard S. (1963) Outsiders. New York: Free Press.
Becker, Howard S. (1974) ‘Art as Collective Action’, American Sociological
Review, 74 December, pp. 767–76.
Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press; French translation (1988) Les Mondes de l’art.
Paris: Flammarion.
Becker, Howard S. (1986) Doing Things Together: Selected Papers. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Becker, Howard S. (1998) The Tricks of the Trade: How to Think of Your Research
While You Are Doing It. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bénichou, Paul (1973) Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750–1830. Paris: José Corti.
Benjamin, Walter (1968) ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
in Benjamin Walter, and Arendt, Hannah (eds), Illuminations. Translated by
Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 219–54; orig. 1936.
Bennett, H. Stith (1980) On Becoming a Rock Musician. Amherst, MA: University
of Massachussetts Press.
Benvéniste, Émile (1980) Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes.
Paris: Minuit.
Bergeron, Katherine and Bohlman, Philip V. (eds) (1992) Disciplining Music:
Musicology and its Canons. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Bergson, Henri (1969) Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France; orig. 1888.
Berliner, Paul F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Berthier, Nicole (1975) ‘Mélomanes et culture musicale, étude d’un statut socio-
culturel’. Doctoral dissertation, Université de Grenoble II.
Bessy, Christian and Chateauraynaud, Francis (1995) Experts et faussaires.
Paris: Métailié.
Biget, Michelle (1986) Le Geste pianistique: Essai sur l’écriture du piano. entre
1800 et 1930. Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, no. 117.
Blacking, John (2000) How Musical Is Man? Seattle, WA: The University of
Washington Press; orig. 1972.
Blau, Judith R., Blau, Peter M. and Golden, Reid (1985) ‘Social Inequality and the
Arts’, American Journal of Sociology, 91(2), pp. 309–31.
Bloch, Marc (1939) La Société féodale et la formation du lien de dépendance.
Paris: A. Michel.
Blumer, Herbert (1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Boime, Albert (1971) The Academy and French Painting in the 19th Century. New
York: Phaidon.
Boltanski, Luc (2012) Love and Justice as Competences: Three Essays on the
Sociology of Action. Translated into English by Catherine Porter. Cambridge:
Polity Press; orig. (1990) L’Amour et la justice comme compétences: Trois
essais de sociologie de l’action. Paris: Métailié.
Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent (1987) Les Économies de la grandeur.
Paris: CEE and Presses universitaires de France.
Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent (2006) On Justification: Economies of
Worth. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press; orig. (1991) De la Justification. Les économies de la grandeur.
Paris: Gallimard.
Bonfait, Olivier (1989) ‘Histoire de l’art et sciences sociales. 1967–1987’, in
Moulin (ed.), pp. 59–79.
Born, Georgina (1988) ‘On Modern Music Culture: Shock, Pop and Synthesis’,
New Formations, 2, Summer 87, pp. 51–78.
Born, Georgina (1993) IRCAM, Modernism and Post Modernism: The Anthropology
of the Musical Avant-Garde. Research report, Paris: IRCAM Library.
Born, Georgina (1995) Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the
Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Borrel, Eugène (1934) L’Interprétation de la musique française (de Lully à
la Révolution). Paris: Félix Alcan; repr. (1978) Paris: Les Introuvables,
Éditions d’Aujourd’hui.
Bibliography 307
Boulez, Pierre (1990) ‘The Vestal Virgin and the Fire-Stealer: Memory, Creation,
and Authenticity’ vol. 18, Issue 3, Early Music (1990), pp. 355–8; orig. (1988)
‘La Vestale et le Voleur de feu’, InHarmoniques, 4, pp. 8–11.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1966) ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’, Les Temps
modernes, 246, pp. 865–906.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1971) ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, L’Année Sociologique,
22, pp. 49–126.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy
of Symbolic Goods’. Translated by Richard Nice. Media, Culture, and Society,
2, pp. 209–23; orig. (1977) ‘La production de la croyance: Contribution à une
économie des biens symboliques’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales,
13, pp. 3–43.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1983) ‘Vous avez dit ‘populaire’?’, Actes de la Recherche en
Sciences sociales, 46, pp. 98–105.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984a) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul; orig. (1979)
La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984b) Homo academicus. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1990a) In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology.
Translated by Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press; orig. (1987)
Choses dites. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1990b) The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice.
Cambridge: Polity Press; orig. (1980) Le Sens pratique. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino.
Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press; orig. (1982) Ce
que parler veut dire. Paris: Fayard.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993a) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993b) Sociology in Question. Translated by Richard Nice.
London: Sage Publications; orig. (1984) Questions de sociologie. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2010) ‘Sociologists of Belief and Beliefs of Sociologists’.
Translated by Véronique Altglas and Matthew Wood. Nordic Journal of
Religion and Society (2010), 23 (1), pp. 1–7.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Boltanski, Luc, Castel, Robert and Chamboredon, Jean-Claude
(1965) Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie.
Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Darbel Alain and Schnapper Dominique (1991) The Love of
Art. Translated by Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman. Cambridge: Polity;
orig. (1966) L’Amour de l’art: Les musées d’art européens et leur public.
Paris: Minuit.
Boyer, Régine, Delclaux, M. and Bounoure, A. (1986) Les Univers culturels des
lycéens et des enseignants. Paris: INRP.
Brake, Mike (1980) The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures.
London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bukofzer, Manfred F. (1947) Music in the Baroque Era: From Monteverdi to

Bach. New York: Norton.
Burckhardt, Jacob (1986) La Civilisation de la Renaissance en Italie. Paris: LGF;
orig. 1860.
Busson, Alain and Evrard, Yves (1987) Portraits économiques de la culture. Paris:
La Documentation française.
Caillois, Roger (1950) L’Homme et le sacré. Paris: Gallimard.
Callon, Michel (ed.) (1989) La Science et ses réseaux: Genèse et circulation des
faits scientifiques. Paris: La Découverte.
Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno (eds) (1982) La Science telle qu’elle se fait.
Paris: Pandore.
Campos, Rémy (2000) La Renaissance introuvable? Entre curiosité et militantisme:
La Société des concerts de musique vocale, religieuse et classique du prince de
la Moskowa (1843–1847). Paris: Klincksieck.
Carles, Philippe and Comolli, Jean-Louis (1971) Free Jazz and Black Power.
Paris: Champ Libre.
Castelnuovo, Enrico (1976) ‘L’histoire sociale de l’art. Un bilan provisoire’, Actes
de la Recherche en Sciences sociales, 6(12), pp. 63–75.
de Certeau, Michel (1980) L’Invention du quotidien, vol 1: Arts de faire.
Paris: UGE.
de Certeau, Michel (1981) ‘Croire: Une pratique de la différence’, Documents,
Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Università di Urbino,
106-A, pp. 1–21.
de Certeau, Michel (1987) La Fable mystique, XVIe-XVIIe siècle, tome 1.
Paris: Gallimard.
de Certeau, Michel (1988) The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley.
New York: Columbia University Press; orig. (1975) L’Écriture de l’histoire.
Paris: Gallimard.
de Certeau, Michel and Giard, Luce (1983) L’Ordinaire de la communication.
Paris: Dalloz.
Chambers, Iain (1985) Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London
and New York: Macmillan.
Chambers, Iain (1986) Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. London
and New York: Methuen.
Chambers, Iain (1990) Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity. London and
New York: Routledge.
Charle, Christophe (1977) ‘Situation spatiale et position sociale. Essai de
géographie sociale du champ littéraire à la fin du XIXe siècle’, Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences sociales, 13, pp. 45–59.
Chartier, Roger (1987) Lecture et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime.
Paris: Seuil.
Chartier, Roger (1993) Pratiques de la lecture. Paris: Payot.
de Clercq, Jacqueline (1970) La Profession de musicien: Une enquête. Brussels:
Éditions de l’Institut de sociologie de l’Université libre de Bruxelles.
Bibliography 309
Cogneau, Denis and Donnat, Olivier (1990) Les Pratiques culturelles des
Français, 1973–1989. Paris: DEP and Ministère de la Culture-La Découverte
and La Documentation française.
Cohen, Albert (1981) Music in the French Academy of Sciences. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Cohen, H.F. (1984) Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of
the Scientific Revolution. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Cohen, Sarah (1991) Rock Culture in Liverpool. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooke, Deryk (1959) The Language of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Corten, W. (1978) ‘Le “Procès de canonisation” de Sébastien Bach en France au
19e siècle‘. Undergraduate (licence) dissertation in musicology supervised by
R. Wangermée, Brussels, ULB.
de Coster, Michel (1976) Le Disque, art ou affaires?. Grenoble: Presses
universitaires de Grenoble.
Couperin, François (1716) L’Art de toucher le clavecin. Paris.
Couperin, François (1722) ‘Préface’ to the Troisième Livre de pièces pour le
clavecin. Paris.
Crane, Diana (1987) The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art
World, 1940–85. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Crow, Thomas (1985) Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.
Damisch, Hubert (1987) L’Origine de la perspective. Paris: Flammarion.
Daniélou, Alain (1967) Sémantique musicale, essai de psycho-physiologie
auditive. Paris: Hermann; repr. 1978, with an Introduction by F. Escal.
Danto, Arthur C. (1964) ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 61, pp. 571–84.
Danto, Arthur C. (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Darnton, Robert (1971) ‘Reading, Writing and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century
France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature’, Daedalus, Winter 71, 10,
pp. 214–56.
Darnton, Robert (1979) The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of
the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Darré, Yann (1986) ‘Les créateurs dans la division du travail: Le cas du cinéma
d’auteur’, in Moulin (ed.) (1986a), pp. 213–22.
Dart, Thurston (1954) The Interpretation of Music. Cambridge, MA: Hutchinson
& Co.
Davenson, Henri (1942) Traité de la musique selon l’esprit de Saint Augustin.
Neuchâtel: La Baconnière.
David, Ernest (1882) La Vie et les œuvres de Jean-Sébastien Bach. Paris: Calmann-
Lévy.
Davies, John Booth (1978) The Psychology of Music. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
da Vinci, Leonardo (2008) Notebooks.Translated by Jean-Paul Richter. Edited

with an Introduction and Notes by Theresa Wells. Oxford: Oxford University
Press; orig. transl. 1888.
Delacroix, Eugène (1986) Des critiques en matière d’art. Caen: Échoppe;
orig. 1829.
Deliège, Célestin (1988) ‘Création musicale autonome et (non) évidence sociale’,
in Vanhulst and Haine (eds), pp. 183–211.
DeNora, Tia (1986) ‘How is Extra-Musical Meaning Possible? Music as a Place
and Space for ‘Work”’, Sociological Theory, 4, Spring 86, pp. 84–94.
DeNora, Tia (1995) Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics
in Vienna, 1792–1803. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
DeNora, Tia (1999) ‘Music as a technology of the self’, Poetics, 26, pp. 1–26.
DeNora, Tia (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
DeNora, Tia and Mehan, Hugh (1993) ‘Genius: A Social Construction’, in John
I. Kitsuse (ed.), Constructing the Social, Los Angeles, CA, and London: Sage
Publications, pp. 157–73.
Descola, Philippe (1989) ‘Homeostasis as a cultural system: The Jivaro Case’,
International Symposium Wenner-Gren Foundation, 2–10 June 1989, Nova
Friburgo, Brazil.
Descola, Philippe, Lenclud, Gérard, Severi, Carlo and Taylor, Anne-Christine
(1988) Les Idées de l’anthropologie. Paris: Armand Colin.
Deutsch, Diana (ed.) (1982) The Psychology of Music. New York: Academic Press.
DeVeaux, Scott (1997) The Birth of BeBop: A Social and Musical History.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Dickie, George (1974) Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Cornell,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Didier, Béatrice (1985) La Musique des Lumières. Paris: Presses universitaires
de France.
DiMaggio, Paul and Hirsch, Paul-M. (1976) ‘Production Organizations in the
Arts’, American Behavourial Scientist, 19, pp. 735–52.
DiMaggio, Paul and Useem, M. (1978a) ‘Cultural Property and Public Policy:
Emerging Tensions in Government Support for the Arts’, Social Research
USA, 45(2), pp. 356–89.
DiMaggio, Paul and Useem, M. (1978b) ‘Social Class and Arts Consumption:
Origins and Consequences of Class Differences in Exposure to the Arts in
America’, Theory & Society, 5(2), pp. 141–61.
DiMaggio, Paul and Useem, M. (1978c) ‘Cultural Democracy in a Period of
Cultural Expansion: The social Composition of Arts Audiences in the United
States’, Social Problems, 26(2), pp. 179–97.
Dolmetsch, Arnold (1915) The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries, Revealed by Contemporary Evidence; repr. (1969)
Seattle: The University of Washington Press.
Bibliography 311
Donington, Robert (1949) Instruments of Music. London and New York: Methuen
and Barnes & Noble.
Donington, Robert (1963) The Interpretation of Early Music. London: Faber
& Faber.
Dreyfus, Laurence (1983) ‘Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory
of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century’, The Musical Quarterly,
69(3), pp. 297–322.
Dubin, Steven C. (1987) Bureaucratizing the Muse: Public Funds and the Cultural
Worker. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Duchamp, Marcel (1975) Duchamp du signe. Paris: Flammarion.
Duchemin, Pierre-Yves (1983) L’Écouteur écouté: Les auditeurs de musique à la
salle d’actualité de la BPI. Paris: BPI.
Dufourt, Hugues and Fauquet, Joël-Marie (eds) (1987) La Musique et le pouvoir.
Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres.
Dufourt, Hugues and Fauquet, Joël-Marie (eds) (1991) La Musique: Du théorique
au politique. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres-Klincksieck.
Dufourt, Hugues and Fauquet, Joël-Marie (eds) (1994) Musique et médiations. Le
métier, l’instrument, l’oreille. Paris: Klincksieck.
Duncan, Robert (1986) Only the Good Die Young: The Rock’n’Roll Book of the
Dead. New York: Harmony Books.
Dupin, François (1981) L’Orchestre nu. Paris: Hachette.
Durant, Alan (1984) Conditions of Music. London: Macmillan.
Durkheim, Émile (1951) Suicide. A Study in Sociology. Translated by J. Spaulding
and G. Simpson. Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press; orig. (1897) Le Suicide. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France.
Durkheim, Émile (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on
Sociology and its Method. Translated by W.D. Halls. Edited by Stephen Lukes.
London: The Free Press; orig. (1894) Les Règles de la méthode sociologique.
Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Durkheim, Émile (2001) Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by
Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press; orig. (1912) Les Formes
élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie. Paris:
Duvignaud, Jean (1973a) The Sociology of Art. Translated by Timothy Wilson.
New York: Harper and Row; orig. (1972) Sociologie de l’art. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France.
Duvignaud, Jean (1973b) Les Ombres collectives: Sociologie du théâtre. Paris:
Duvignaud, Jean (1980) Le Jeu du jeu. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Easton, M. (1964) Artists and Writers in Paris: The Bohemian Idea, 1803–1867.
London: Edward Arnold.
Eco, Umberto (1976) A Theory of Semiotics. Translated by Umberto Eco and David
Osmond-Smith. Bloomington, IN, and London: Indiana University Press.
Edgerton, Samuel Jr (1976) The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective.

New York: Harper & Row, Icon Editions.
Ehrlich, Cyril (1976) The Piano: A History. London: J.M. Dent & Sons.
Ehrlich, Cyril (1985) The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth
Century: A Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Eisenstein, Elisabeth L. (1979) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:
Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Elias, Norbert (1994) Mozart: Portrait of a Genius. Cambridge: Polity.
Emery, Eric (1975) Temps et musique: Temps et dialectique de la durée. Lausanne:
L’Âge d’Homme.
Escal, Françoise (1990) Contrepoints: Musique et littérature. Paris:
Méridiens Klincksieck.
Fabiani, Jean-Louis (1986) ‘Carrières improvisées: Théories et pratiques de la
musique de jazz en France’, in Moulin (ed.) (1986a), pp. 231–45.
Fajon, Robert (1984) L’Opéra à Paris, du Roi-Soleil à Louis le Bien-Aimé. Geneva
and Paris: Slatkine.
Faulkner, Robert R. (1971) Hollywood Studio Musicians: Their Work and Careers
in the Recording Industry. Chicago and New York: Aldine-Atherton.
Faulkner, Robert R. (1973) ‘Careers Concerns and Mobility Motivations of
Orchestra Musicians’, Sociological Quarterly, 14, pp. 334–49.
Faulkner, Robert R. (1983) Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the
Hollywood Film Industry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Fauquet, Joël-Marie (1986) Les Sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la
restauration à 1870. Paris: Klincksieck.
Fauquet, Joël-Marie and Hennion, Antoine (2000) La Grandeur de Bach: L’amour
de la musique en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Fayard.
Faure, Michel (1985) Musique et société du Second Empire aux Années vingt.
Paris: Flammarion.
Faure, Michel (1991) ‘Du traditionalisme esthétique au corporatisme juridique
dans la musique française de 1918 à 1944’, in Dufourt and Fauquet (eds),
pp. 365–89.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne (1977) Les Mots, la mort, les sorts: La sorcellerie dans le
bocage. Paris: Gallimard.
Flichy, Patrice (1980) Les Industries de l’imaginaire. Grenoble: Presses
universitaires de Grenoble.
Focillon, Henri (1989) The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by George Kubler. New
York: Zone Books; orig. (1943) Vie des formes. Paris: Presses universitaires
de France.
Foucault, Michel (1963) Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard
médical. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Foucault, Michel (1966) Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1977) ‘What is an Author?’, in D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language,
Countermemory, Practice, 113–38. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press;
Bibliography 313
orig. (1969) ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, Bulletin de la Société Française de

Philosophie, 69(3), pp. 73–104.
Fraisse, Paul and Hiriartborde, E. (1968) Les Aptitudes rythmiques. Paris: CNRS.
Francastel, Pierre (1965) La Réalité figurative, éléments structurels de sociologie
de l’art. Paris: Gonthier.
Francastel, Pierre (1967) La Figure et le lieu: L’ordre visuel du Quattrocento.
Paris: Gallimard.
Francastel, Pierre (1977) Peinture et société: Naissance et destruction d’un espace
plastique de la Renaissance au cubisme. Paris: Denoël-Gonthier; orig. (1951)
Paris and Lyon: Audin.
Francès, Robert (1958) La Perception de la musique. Paris:Vrin.
Francès, Robert (1979) Psychologie de l’art et de l’esthétique. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France.
Friedberg, Erhard and Urfalino, Philippe (1984) Le Jeu du catalogue. Paris: La
Friedmann, Georges (1979) Ces merveilleux instruments. Paris: Denoël-Gonthier.
Frith, Simon (1978) The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable.
Frith, Simon (1981) Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll.
London: Constable.
Frith, Simon (1988) Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop.
Cambridge: Blackwell.
Frith, Simon (ed.) (1990) Facing the Music. New York: Pantheon Books.
Frith, Simon (1996) Performing Rites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frith, Simon and Goodwin, Andrew (eds) (1990) On Record: Rock, Pop, and the
Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books.
Frow, John (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Values. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fulcher, Jane F. (2002) The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; orig. 1987.
Gamboni, Dario (1983) ‘Méprises et mépris. Éléments pour une étude de
l’iconoclasme contemporain’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales, 49,
September 83, pp. 2–28.
Gamboni, Dario (1985) Louis Rivier et la peinture religieuse en Suisse romande.
Lausanne: Payot.
Gamboni, Dario (1987) ‘Introduction’ to La Géographie artistique: Arts et culture
visuels en Suisse. Ars Helvetica, vol.1. Disentis: Desertina.
Gamboni, Dario (1997) The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since
the French Revolution. Translated by Mary Whittal. London: Reaktion Books;
orig. (1983) Un iconoclasme moderne: Théorie et pratiques contemporaines
du vandalisme artistique. Zurich: Institut suisse pour l’État de l’Art, and
Lausanne: Éditions d’En-Bas.
Gamboni, Dario (2011) The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature.
Translated by Mary Whittal. Revised and updated from the French edition,
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press; orig. (1989) La Plume et le
pinceau: Odilon Redon et la littérature. Paris: Minuit.
Garfinkel, Harold (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice Hall.
Geertz, Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Geoffroy-Dechaume, Antoine (1964a) Les ‘Secrets’ de la musique ancienne:
Recherches sur l’interprétation, XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Fasquelle.
Geoffroy-Dechaume, Antoine (1964b) ‘Connaissance de Rameau’, La Revue
Musicale, 260, pp. 37–45.
Gerbod, Paul (1980) ‘L’Institution orphéonique en France du XIXe au XXe siècle’,
Ethnologie française, 10(1), January–March 80, pp. 27–44.
Gétreau, Florence (1992) ‘Le cabinet d’instruments du Conservatoire de musique et
le débat sur le Muséum des arts et des sciences’, in Hennion (ed.), pp. 581–94.
Giddins, Gary (2013) Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (revised edition); orig. 1987.
Gillett, Charlie (1972) The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New
York: Souvenir Press.
Ginzburg, Carlo (2000) The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca. Translated
from the Italian by Martin Ryle and Kate Soper. London: Verso; orig.
transl. 1985.
Girard, Jean-Yves (1989) ‘La gödelite’, in Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman,
Jean-Yves Girard and Kurt Gödel (eds), Le Théorème de Gödel. Paris: Seuil,
pp. 167–71.
Girard, René (1961) Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset.
Girard, René (1972) La Violence et le sacré. Paris: Grasset.
Girard, René (1976) Critique dans un souterrain. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme.
Girard, René (1978) Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde.
Paris: Grasset.
Glaser, Barney and Strauss, Anselm (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory.
Hawthorne, NY: Aldine Publishing Company.
Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York:
Anchor Books.
Goffman, Erving (1961) Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction –
Fun in Games & Role Distance. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Goffman, Erving (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Goffman, Erving (1983) ‘Felicity’s Condition’, American Journal of Sociology,
89(1), July 83, pp. 1–53.
Goldmann, Lucien (1964) Pour une sociologie du roman. Paris: Gallimard.
Goldmann, Lucien (1965) Le Dieu caché. Paris: Gallimard.
Goldmann, Lucien (1976) Cultural Creation in Modern Society. Translated by
Bart Grahl, Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing; orig. (1971) La Création
culturelle dans la société moderne. Paris: Denoël.
Gomart, Émilie and Hennion, Antoine (1999) ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music
Lovers, Drug Addicts’, in John Law and John Hassard (eds), Actor Network
Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 220–47.
Bibliography 315
Gombrich, Ernst H. (1978) Meditations on a Hobby-Horse: And Other Essays on

the Theory of Art. London: Phaidon; orig. 1963.
Gombrich, Ernst H. (1979) Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and
in Art. Oxford: Phaidon; French translation (1983) L’Écologie des images.
Paris: Flammarion.
Gombrich, Ernst H. (1999) The Use of Images: Studies in the Social Function of
Art and Visual Communication. London: Phaidon.
Good, Edwin M. (1982) Giraffes, Black Dragons and Other Pianos: A
Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Goody, Jack (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gould, Glenn and Monsaingeon, Bruno (1983) Le Dernier puritain. Paris: Fayard.
Graña, Cesar (1971) Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and
Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Green, Anne-Marie (1987) Les Jeunes et la musique. Paris: EAP.
Grignon, Claude and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1989) Le Savant et le populaire:
Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature. Paris: Seuil-
Gallimard.
Griswold, Wendy (1987) Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge
Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576–1980. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press.
Gumplowicz, Philippe (1990) ‘France: 1918–1935. La création du jazz. Dévots et
praticiens’, in Dufourt and Fauquet (eds), pp. 345–63.
Gumplowicz, Philippe (1991) Le Roman du jazz: Première époque: 1893–1930.
Paris: Fayard.
Gumplowicz, Philippe (2001) Les Travaux d’Orphée: 150 ans de vie musicale
amateur en France; harmonies, chorales, fanfares. Paris: Aubier; orig. 1987.
Gumplowicz, Philippe, Rostain, Michel and Samoff, Marjorie (1978) ‘Le métier
de musicien’, Musique en jeu, (30), March 78.
Hadjinicolaou, Nicos (1973) Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes. Paris: Maspéro.
Hagen, M.A. (1980) The Perception of Pictures, 1, Alberti’s Window: The
Projective Model of Pictorial Information. New York: Academic Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice (1939) ‘La mémoire collective chez les musiciens’, La Revue
philosophique, March–April 39, pp. 136–65.
Hames, R. and Vickers, W. (eds) (1983) Adaptive Responses of Native Amazonians.
New York: Academic Press.
Harnoncourt, Nikolaus (1985) Le Dialogue musical: Monteverdi, Bach et Mozart.
Paris: Gallimard.
Haskell, Francis (1980a) Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between
Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque; orig. 1963.
Haskell, Francis (1980b) Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Collecting,
and Fashion in England and France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press;
orig. 1976; French translation: Francis Haskell, 1986, La Norme et le caprice:

Redécouvertes en art. Paris: Flammarion.
Haskell, Francis (1987) Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Haskell, Francis and Penny, Nicholas (1982) Taste and the Antique: The Lure
of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press;
orig. 1981; French translation (1988) Pour l’amour de l’Antique: La statuaire
grécoromaine et le goût européen, 1500–1900. Paris: Hachette.
Hauser, Arnold (1982) The Social History of Art, Translated by Kenneth
J. Northcott. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press; orig. 1974.
Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New
York: Methuen.
Heinich, Nathalie (1981) ‘La constitution du champ de la peinture française au
XVIIe siècle’. Doctoral dissertation, EHESS, Paris.
Heinich, Nathalie (1997) The Glory of van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration.
Translated by Paul Leduc Browne. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press;
orig. (1991) La Gloire de Van Gogh: Pour une anthropologie de l’admiration.
Paris: Minuit.
Hendon, William S. (1979) Analysing an Art Museum. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Hennion, Antoine (1981) Les Professionnels du disque: Une sociologie des
variétés. Paris: A.-M. Métailié.
Hennion, Antoine (1983a) ‘Une sociologie de l’intermédiaire: Le cas du directeur
artistique de variétés’, Sociologie du Travail, 4-83, pp. 459–74.
Hennion, Antoine (1983b) ‘The Production of Success: An Anti-Musicology of
the Pop Song’, Popular Music 3: 159–93; reprinted (1990) in Simon Frith and
Andrew Goodwin (eds) On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. New
York: Pantheon, pp. 185–206.
Hennion, Antoine (1987) ‘Rameau et l’harmonie: Comment avoir raison de la
musique?’, in de La Gorce (ed.), pp. 393–408.
Hennion, Antoine (1988) Comment la musique vient aux enfants: Une
anthropologie de l’enseignement musical. Paris: Anthropos.
Hennion, Antoine (1989) ‘An Intermediary between Production and Consumption:
The Producer of Popular Music’, Science, Technology and Human Values,
14(4), pp. 400–424.
Hennion, Antoine (1991) ‘À propos de la réinterprétation d’un répertoire oublié:
Objections musicales’, in Dufourt and Fauquet (eds), pp. 181–207.
Hennion, Antoine (ed.) (1992) 1789–1989: Musique, histoire, démocratie. Paris:
Vibrations-IASPM, Éditions de la MSH and Ministère de la Culture.
Hennion, Antoine (1994a) ‘La sociologie de l’art est une sociologie du médiateur’,
in Pierre-Michel Menger et Jean-Claude Passeron (eds) L’Art de la recherche:
Mélanges en l’honneur de Raymonde Moulin. Paris: La Documentation
française, pp. 169–88.
Hennion, Antoine (1994b) ‘Institution et marché: Représentations musicales, à
propos d’une audition de variétés’, in Dufourt and Fauquet (eds), pp. 145–61.
Bibliography 317
Hennion, Antoine (1997a) ‘La sociologie est-elle définitivement allergique au

génie?’, in L. Bertrand Dorléac, L. Gervereau, S. Guilbaut and G. Monnier
(eds), Où va l’histoire de l’art contemporain?. Paris: L’image and ÉNSBA,
pp. 230–40.
Hennion, Antoine (1997b) ‘Le Baroque, un goût si moderne’, in F. Borel,
M.-O. Gonseth, J. Hainard and R. Kaehr (eds), Pom pom pom pom: Musiques
et caetera. Neuchatel: GHK, pp. 21–38.
Hennion, Antoine (1997c) ‘Baroque and Rock: Music, Mediators and Musical
Taste’, Poetics, 24(6), July, pp. 415–35.
Hennion, Antoine (2001) ‘Music Lovers. Taste as Performance’, Theory, Culture,
Society, 18(5), pp. 1–22.
Hennion, Antoine (2002) ‘L’écoute à la question’, Revue de Musicologie, 88(1),
pp. 95–149.
Hennion, Antoine (2004) ‘Pragmatics of taste’, in Mark Jacobs and Nancy
Hanrahan (eds) The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture. Oxford
and Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 131–44.
Hennion, Antoine (2007) ‘Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and
Sociology’, Cultural Sociology, 1(1), pp. 97–114.
Hennion, Antoine (2009) ‘Authenticité, goût, interprétation: La leçon du faux en
musique’, in Marcella Lista (ed.) De main de maître: L’artiste et le faux. Paris:
Musée du Louvre Éditions, pp. 113–32.
Hennion, Antoine (2010a) ‘Vous avez dit attachements? … ’, in Madeleine Akrich
et al. (eds) Débordements: Mélanges en l’honneur de Michel Callon. Paris:
Presses de l’École des Mines, pp. 179–90.
Hennion, Antoine (2010b) ‘The Price of the People. Sociology, Performance,
Reflexivity’, in Elizabeth B. Silva and Alan Warde (eds) Cultural Analysis
and Bourdieu’s Legacy. London: Routledge and CRESC, pp. 117–27; orig.
1985, ‘Esthétique populaire ou théâtralité théorique? Le peuple, le sociologue,
et le producteur à succès’, in Esthétiques du peuple. Paris: La Découverte and
Presses universitaires de Vincennes, pp. 249–65.
Hennion, Antoine and Vignolle, Jean-Pierre (1978) L’Économie du disque en
France. Paris: La Documentation française.
Hennion, Antoine, Martinat, Françoise and Vignolle, Jean-Pierre (1983) Les
Conservatoires et leurs élèves. Paris: La Documentation française.
Hennion, Antoine and Méadel, Cécile (1985) Ethnographie d’une antenne: Le
travail des gens de radio. Paris: CNET and CNRS and Centre de Sociologie
de l’Innovation.
Hennion, Antoine and Méadel, Cécile (1986) ‘Programming Music: Radio as
Mediator’, Media, Culture & Society, 8(3), July 1986, pp. 281–303.
Hennion, Antoine and Schnapper, Laure (1986) La Musique et l’accusation:
Pour une ethnologie du solfège, Research report. Paris: Centre de Sociologie
de l’Innovation.
Hennion, Antoine and Fauquet, Joël-Marie (2001) ‘Authority as performance: The
love for Bach in nineteenth-century France’, Poetics, 29, pp. 75–88.
Hennion, Antoine, Maisonneuve, Sophie and Gomart, Émilie (2000) Figures de

l’amateur: Formes, objets, pratiques de l’amour de la musique aujourd’hui.
Paris: La Documentation française and DEP-Ministère de la Culture.
Himelfarb, Constance (1990) Conference paper delivered at the Journées de la
Société française de Musicologie, 26–28 June, Tours.
Hirsch, Paul M. (1970) The Structure of the Popular Music Industry. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press.
Hirschfeld, Paul (1968) Mäzene: Die Rolle des Antraggebers in der Kunst.
Munich: Deutscher Kreustverlag.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1985) Écrits sur la musique. Paris: L’Âge
d’Homme; orig. 1816–20.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1985) Gödel, Escher, Bach, les brins d’une guirlande
éternelle. Paris: Interéditions.
Honegger, Marc and Meyer, Christian (eds) (1986) La Musique et le rite sacré et
profane, vol. I, XIIIe Congrès de la Société internationale de Musicologie, 29
August – 3 September 1982. Strasbourg: Ophrys and Universités de Strasbourg.
Hope, Charles (1981) ‘Artists, Patrons, and Advisers in the Italian Renaissance’,
in Lytle and Orgel (eds), pp. 293–343.
Hopkins, Jerry and Sugerman, Danny (1980) No One Here Gets Out Alive. New
York: Warner Books.
Huet, Armel, Ion, Jacques, Lefebvre, Alain, Miège, Bernard and Péron, René
(1978) Capitalisme et industries culturelles. Grenoble: Presses universitaires
de Grenoble.
Hugo, Victor (2001) William Shakespeare. Translated by Melville B. Anderson,
Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific; orig. transl. 1887.
Imberty, Michel (1979–81) Sémantique psychologique de la musique, 1, Entendre
la musique. 2, Les Écritures du temps. Paris: Dunod.
Impey, Oliver and Arthur Macgregor (eds) (1985) The Origins of Museums. The
Cabinet of Curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Iser, Wolfgang (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jakobson, Roman (1973) Questions de poétique. Paris: Seuil.
Jakobson, Roman and Halle, M. (2011) Fundamentals of Language. Charleston,
SC: Nabu Press; orig. (1956) The Hague: Mouton Reed.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1974) Fauré et l’inexprimable. Paris: Plon.
Janson, H.W. (1981) ‘The Birth of ‘Artistic License’: The Dissatisfied Patron in
the Early Renaissance’, in Lytle and Orgel (eds), pp. 344–53.
Jaumain, Miche (1983) Quelques aspects économiques des arts du spectacle
vivant, 1983–3. Brussels: Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie de Bruxelles.
Jauss, Hans-Robert (1982) Towards an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Johnson, James H. (1995) Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Bibliography 319
Junod, Philippe (1976) Transparence et opacité. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme.

Kamerman, Jack B. and Martorella, Rosanne (1983) Performers and Performances:
The Social Organization of Artistic Work. New York: Praeger.
Kerman, Joseph (1985) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren (1992) Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Translated and
introduced by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books.
Klein, Robert (1970) La Forme et l’intelligible: Écrits sur la Renaissance et l’art
moderne. Paris: Gallimard.
Kreutzer, Léon (1846) ‘Revue critique. La Passion, de J.-S. Bach’, Revue et
Gazette Musicale de Paris, 17 May.
Kris, Ernst and Kurz, Otto (1981) Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the
Artist: A Historical Experiment. Translated by Alastair Laing and revised by
Lottie M. Newman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; orig. 1934.
de La Gorce, Jérôme (ed.) (1987) Jean-Philippe Rameau: Actes du Colloque
international de la société Rameau, Dijon, 21–24 Sept. 1983, Paris-
Geneva: Champion-Slatkine.
La Rochelle, Réal (1987) Callas, la diva et le vinyle. La popularisation de l’opéra
par l’industrie du disque. Montréal and La Tronche: Triptyque and La Vague
à l’âme.
Labajo Valdés, Joaquina (1987) Approximacion al fenomeno: Orfeonistico en
España (Valladolid 1890–1923). Valladolid, Diputacion provincial.
Labie, Jean-François (1989) William Christie: Sonate baroque. Aix-en-
Provence: Alinéa.
Lagrée, Jean-Charles (1982) Les Jeunes chantent leurs cultures. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Lalo, Charles (1908) Esquisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique. Paris:
Félix Alcan.
Lalo, Charles (1912) Introduction à l’esthétique. Paris: Félix Alcan.
Lalo, Charles (1921) L’Art et la vie sociale. Paris: Doin.
Lange, André (1986) Stratégies de la musique. Liège-Brussels: Mardaga.
Langer, Suzanne K. (1942) Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA, and
London: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (1984) Les Microbes: Guerre et paix, suivi de Irréductions.
Paris: Métailié.
Latour, Bruno (1990) ‘Quand les anges deviennent de bien mauvais messagers’,
Terrain, 14, pp. 76–91.
Latour, Bruno (1991) Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie
symétrique. Paris: La Découverte.
Laude, Jean (1969) ‘Lecture ethnologique de l’art’, in Teyssèdre and Bourdieu
(eds), pp. 177–208.
Laurent, Jeanne (1981) Arts et pouvoirs en France de 1793 à 1981. Saint-
Etienne: CIEREC.
Le Cerf de La Viéville, Jean-Laurent (1705) Comparaison de la musique italienne
et de la musique française; reprinted 1972. Geneva: Minkoff.
Le Moigne-Mussat, Marie-Claire (1986) ‘Nouveaux rituels dans la musique

d’aujourd’hui’, in Honegger and Meyer (eds), pp. 255–66.
Lehmann, Bernard (1989) ‘Les Musiciens: Instrumentistes ou instruments du
chef?’, Corps écrit, 35, pp. 107–13.
Leibowitz, René (1986) Le Compositeur et son double: Essais sur l’interprétation
musicale. Paris: Gallimard.
Leipp, Émile (1977) La Machine à écouter. Paris: Masson.
Leipp, Émile (1987) Acoustique et musique. Paris: Masson; orig. 1971.
Lenclud, Gérard (1987) ‘La tradition n’est plus ce qu’elle était …’, Terrain, 9,
pp. 110–23.
Lenoir, Rémi (1979) ‘Notes pour une histoire sociale du piano’, Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences sociales, 28, June 79, pp. 79–82.
Leppert, Richard and McClary, Susan (eds) (1987) Music and Society: The
Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Leroy, Dominique (1980) Économie des arts du spectacle vivant. Paris: Economica.
Leroy, Dominique (1990) Histoire des arts du spectacle vivant. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963) Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire
Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books; orig. (1958)
Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John and
Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row; orig. (1964) Le Cru et le
Cuit, Mythologies I. Paris: Plon.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1996) The Jealous Potter. Translated by Bénédicte Chorier.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press; orig. transl. 1989; orig. (1985)
La Potière jalouse. Paris: Plon.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2001) Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Translated
by Felicity Baker. London: Reed; orig. transl. Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1987; orig. in Mauss (1950), pp. I–LII.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2004) The Savage Mind. Translated by George Weidenfeld.
Oxford: Oxford University Press; orig. (1962) La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.
Lochmann, Vincent (1988) ‘Voir la musique: Le film en ethnomusicologie’,
Vibrations, 6, pp. 204–20.
Lukács, György (1967) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press;
orig. 1923.
Lukács, György (1971) The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical
Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; orig. 1915.
Lytle, G.F. and Orgel, S. (eds) (1981) Patronage in the Renaissance. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackerness, Eric D. (1964) A Social History of English Music. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Bibliography 321
McClellan, Andrew (1994) Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics and the Origins of
the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge, UK, and New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Macdonald, Sharon and Fyfe, Gordon (1996) Theorizing Museums: Representing
Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell Publishers and The Sociological Review.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New
York: McGraw Hill.
Maisonneuve, Sophie (2001) ‘Between History and Commodity: The Production
of a Musical Patrimony through the Record in the 1920–1930s’, Poetics, 29(2),
July 01, pp. 89–108.
Makarius, Michel I. (1975) ‘Adorno. et le viol de la médiation’, in Adorno. et al.
(eds) Revue d’Esthétique, 1–2, ‘Présences d’Adorno’, pp. 192–206.
Malinowski, Bronislaw K. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account
of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New
Guinea. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, Bronislaw K. (1937) ‘Culture as a Determinant of Behaviour’,
in Factors Determining Human Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Tercentenary Publications.
Malinowski, Bronislaw K. (1944) A Scientific Theory of Culture and Others
Essays. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw K. (1967) A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, Herbert (1979) The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist
Aesthetics. London: Macmillan; orig. 1977, Die Permanenz der Kunst: Wider
eine bestimmte Marxistische Aesthetik.
Marie, Jean-Étienne (1976) L’Homme musical. Paris: Arthaud.
Marin, Louis (1975) La Critique du discours. Sur la Logique de Port-Royal et les
Pensées de Pascal. Paris: Minuit.
Marin, Louis (1981) Le Portrait du Roi. Paris: Minuit.
Marin, Louis (1989) Opacité de la peinture: Essai sur la représentation au
Quattrocento. Paris: Usher.
Marmontel, Antonin (1886) Éléments d’esthétique musicale. Paris: Au Ménestrel.
Martin, Henri-Jean (1988) Histoire et pouvoirs de l’écrit. Paris: Librairie
académique Perrin.
Martin, Henri-Jean, Chartier, Roger and Vivet, Jean-Pierre (eds) (1982–86)
Histoire de l’édition française. Paris: Promodis.
Martorella, Rosanne (1982) The Sociology of Opera. New York: Praeger.
Massip Catherine (1976) La Vie des musiciens de Paris au temps de Mazarin
(1643–1661), essai d’étude sociale. Paris: Picard.
Massip, Catherine (1987) ‘Rameau et l’édition de ses œuvres: Bref aperçu
historique et méthodique’, in de La Gorce (ed.), pp. 131–40.
Mauss, Marcel (1950) Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses universitaires

de France.
Melot, Michel (1973) ‘Les frontières de l’originalité et les problèmes de l’estampe
contemporaine’, Revue de l’Art, 21, pp. 108–18.
Melot, Michel (1986) ‘La notion d’originalité et son importance dans la définition
des objets d’art’, in Moulin (ed.) (1986a), pp. 191–202.
Menger, Pierre-Michel (1979) La Condition du compositeur et le marché de la
musique contemporaine. Paris: CNRS and SACEM and Ministère de la Culture.
Menger, Pierre-Michel (1983) Le Paradoxe du musicien; le compositeur, le
mélomane et l’Etat dans la société contemporaine. Paris: Flammarion.
Menger, Pierre-Michel (1989) Les Laboratoires de la création musicale:
Acteurs, organisations et politique de la recherche musicale. Paris: La
Menger, Pierre-Michel (n.d.) Les Sciences sociales et l’art. Paris: CESH.
Merleau-Ponty, Claude (1964) Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard.
Merriam, Alan P. (1964) The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Meyer, Karl E. (1979) The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics. New York:
W. Morrow.
Meyer, Leonard B. (1956) Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, IL: The
Mialaret, Jean-Pierre (1970) ‘Description par les jeunes enfants de sons de hauteurs
différentes’. Master’s dissertation (Maîtrise) in Psychology, Université de
Paris X.
Middleton, Richard (1990) Studying Popular Music, Milton Keynes and
Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
Miège, Bernard, Pajon, Patrick and Salaün, Jean-Michel (1986) L’Industrialisation
de l’audiovisuel, des programmes pour les nouveaux médias. Paris: Aubier.
Mignon, Patrick and Hennion, Antoine (eds) (1991) Rock: De l’histoire au mythe.
Paris: Anthropos.
Mignon, Patrick, Daphy, Eliane and Boyer, Régine (1986) Les Lycéens et la
musique. Paris: INRP.
Millet, Catherine (1987) L’Art contemporain en France. Paris: Flammarion.
Molino, Jean (1975) ‘Fait musical et sémiologie de la musique’, Musique en jeu,
7, pp. 37–61.
Montias, John Michael (1982) Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic
Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Morgan, Alun (1984) Count Basie. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Spellmount Publishers.
Morrow, M.S. (1989) Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna: Aspects of a Developing
Musical and Social Institution. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press.
Moulin, Raymonde (1967) Le Marché de la peinture en France. Paris: Minuit;
repr. 1991.
Moulin, Raymonde (1978) ‘La genèse de la rareté artistique’, Ethnologie française,
8(2–3), March–Sept. 78, pp. 241–58.
Bibliography 323
Moulin, Raymonde (ed.) (1986a) Sociologie de l’art: Colloque international de

Marseille, 13–14 June 1985. Paris: Société française de Sociologie and La
Moulin, Raymonde (1986b) ‘Le marché et le musée’, Revue française de
sociologie, 27(3), pp. 369–95.
Moulin, Raymonde (ed.) (1989) L’Année sociologique, ‘Art et sciences
sociales’, 39.
Moulin, Raymonde (1992) L’Artiste, l’institution et le marché. Paris: Flammarion.
Moulin, Raymonde, Passeron, Jean-Claude, Pasquier, Dominique and Porto-
Vazquez, François (1985) Les Artistes: Essai de morphologie sociale. Paris:
La Documentation française.
Mowitt, John (1987) ‘The sound of music in the era of its electronic reproducibility’,
in Leppert and McClary (eds), pp. 173–97.
Mukerji, C. (1983) From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1975a) Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique.
Paris: UGE.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1975b) ‘De la sémiologie à la sémantique musicales’,
Musique en jeu, 17, Jan. 75, pp. 3–9.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1989) ‘Le Paradoxe du sociologue’, Contrechamps, 10,
pp. 140–69; followed by Menger, Pierre-Michel, ‘Jugement scientifique et
soupçon critique, réponse à Jean-Jacques Nattiez’, pp. 170–76.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990) Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of
Music. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press;
orig. (1987) Musicologie générale et sémiologie. Paris: Bourgois.
Netzer, Dick (1978) The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the
United States. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Neumann, Frederick (1978) Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Newman, Joyce (1986) ‘Rock and Ritual’, in Honegger and Meyer (eds),
pp. 273–85.
Newton, Francis (1959) The Jazz Scene. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Noiray Michel (1991) ‘Inertie sociale et dynamique de la musique de 1740 à
1770’, in Dufourt and Fauquet (eds), pp. 211–18.
Nye, R. (1970) The Unembarrassed Muse. New York: Dial Press.
Oesterle, Louis (ed.) (1967) Early Keyboard Music: A Collection of Pieces Written
for the Virginal, Spinet, Harpsichord and Clavichord. With an Introduction by
Richard Aldrich. New York: Schirmer Library of Musical Classics; orig. 1904.
Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
London and New York: Methuen.
Ory, Pascal (1987) ‘L’Histoire culturelle de la France contemporaine. Question et
questionnement’, Vingtième Siècle, 16, pp. 67–82.
Ory, Pascal (1989) L’Aventure culturelle française, 1945–1989. Paris: Flammarion.
Panofsky, Erwin (1967): Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, précédé

de l’Abbé Suger de Saint-Denis. Translation and Preface by Pierre Bourdieu.
Paris: Minuit.
Panofsky, Erwin (1979) Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis and its
Art Treasures. Translated and annotated by Erwin Panofsky. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press; orig. 1946.
Panofsky, Erwin (1981) ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’. Translated by Kenneth
J. Northcote and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry, 8(81), pp. 17–34.
Panofsky, Erwin (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher
S. Wood. New York: Zone Books and MIT Press.
Patureau, Frédérique (1981) ‘Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne,
1875–1914’. Doctoral dissertation, Paris, EHESS.
Patureau, Frédérique (1986) ‘L’Opéra de Paris ou les ambiguïtés de l’enjeu
culturel’, in Moulin (ed.) (1986a), pp. 83–93.
Pavel, Thomas (1986) Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Peacock, Alan and Weir, Ronald (1975) The Composer on the Market Place.
London: Faber Music.
Pearce, Susan M. (1992) Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural
Study. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1991) Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. Chapel
Hill, NC: UNC Books.
Pestelli, Giorgio (1984) The Age of Mozart and Beethoven. Translated by Eric
Cross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peterson, Richard A. (ed.) (1976) The Production of Culture. Beverly Hills, CA,
and London: Sage.
Peterson, Richard A. and Berger, David G. (1975) ‘Cycles in Symbol Production:
The Case of Popular Music’, American Sociological Review, 40(2), pp. 158–73;
repr. (1990) Frith and Goodwin (eds).
Peterson, Richard A. and Ryan, John (1982) ‘The Product Image’, in J.S. Ettema,
D.C. Whitney (eds) Individuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and
Constraint. London Annual Reviews 10, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage & Whitney,
pp. 11–32.
Pirro, André (1932) ‘Comment jouer Bach à l’orgue?’, La Revue musicale, 131,
December 32, pp. 20–26.
Pistone, Danièle (1987) ‘Rameau à Paris au XIXe siècle’, in de La Gorce (ed.),
pp. 145–57.
de Place, Adélaïde (1986) Le Piano-forte à Paris entre 1760 et 1822. Paris: Aux
Amateurs de Livres.
de Place, Adélaïde (1989) La Vie musicale en France au temps de la Révolution.
Paris: Fayard.
Poizat, Michel (1986) L’Opéra ou le Cri de l’ange. Paris: Métailié.
Pomian, Krzysztof (1990) Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800.
Translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Oxford: Polity Press.
Bibliography 325
Ponton, Rémy (1977) ‘Le Champ littéraire en France de 1865 à 1905: Recrutement
des écrivains, structure des carrières et production des œuvres’. Doctoral
dissertation, EHESS, Paris.
Poujol, Geneviève and Labourie, Raymond (eds) (1979) Les Cultures populaires:
Permanence et émergence des cultures minoritaires locales, ethniques,
sociales et religieuses. Toulouse: INEP and Privat.
Poulot, Dominique (1981) ‘L’avenir du passé. Les musées en mouvement’, Le
Débat, 81 May, pp. 105–15.
Poulot, Dominique (1986) ‘Les mutations de la sociabilité dans les musées français
et les stratégies des conservateurs 1960–1980’, in Moulin (ed.) (1986a),
pp. 95–109.
Quantz, J.-J. (1752) Essai d’une Méthode pour apprendre à jouer de la flûte
traversière. Berlin; repr. 1975. Paris: Aug. Zurfluh.
Quantz, Johann Joachim (1985) On Playing the Flute. Translated with Notes and
an Introduction by Edward R. Reilly. London: Faber and Faber; orig. 1752.
Rameau, Jean-Philippe (1967) Complete Theoretical Writings, Erwin R. Jacobi
(ed.), American Institute of Musicology.
Raynor, Henry (1972) A Social History of Music from the Middle Ages to
Beethoven. London: Barrie & Jenkins.
Raynor, Henry (1976) Music and Society since 1815. London: Barrie & Jenkins.
Recanati, François (1979) Transparence et énonciation. Paris: Minuit.
Reisner, Robert (1977) Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker. Cambridge, MA: Da
Capo Press.
Riegl, Aloïs (1893) Stilfragen, Berlin: G. Siemens.
Riegl, Aloïs (1898) Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste; reprinted 1966.
Graz-Cologne: Böhlau.
Rivière, Claude (1988) Les Liturgies politiques. Paris: Presses universitaires
de France.
Rosen, Charles (1971) The Classical Style: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart. New
York: Norton.
Rosenblum, Barbara (1978) Photographers at Work: A Sociology of Photographic
Styles. New York: Holmes & Meier.
Rosengren, K.E. (1968) Social Aspects of the Literary System. Stockholm: Natur
och Kultur.
Ross, E. (1976) ‘The Achuara Jivaro: Cultural Adaptation in the Upper Amazon’.
Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University.
Rouget, Gilbert (1985) Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between
Music and Possession. Translated by Brunhilde Biebuyck. Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press; orig. (1980) La Musique et la transe.
Paris: Gallimard.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1966) On the Origin of Language. Translated with
Afterword by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago, IL: The University
of Chicago Press; orig. (1781) Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé
de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2010) The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the

Imagination. Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge; orig. (1940)
L’Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard.
Sauveur, Joseph (1701) Principes d’acoustique et de musique, ou Systême général
des intervalles des sons. Paris; repr. (1973) Geneva: Minkoff.
Schaeffner, André (1936) Origine des instruments de musique, introduction
ethnologique à l’histoire de la musique instrumentale. Paris: Payot; repr. 1980.
Paris: Mouton.
Schaeffner, André (1980) Essais de musicologie et autres fantaisies. Paris:
Le Sycomore.
Schaeffer, Pierre (1966) Traité des objets musicaux, essai interdisciplines.
Paris: Seuil.
Schama, Simon (1997) The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch
Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Vintage Book; orig. 1988.
Schapiro, Meyer (1964) The Parma Ildefonsus: A Romanesque Illuminated
Manuscript from Cluny, and Related Works. New York: College Art Association
of America.
Schnapper, Antoine (1988) Le Géant, la licorne et la tulipe: Collections et
collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Flammarion.
Schoenberg, Arnold (1975) Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg.
Translated by Leo Black. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Schücking, Levin L. (1966) The Sociology of Literary Taste. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul; orig. 1931.
Schutz, Alfred (1951) ‘Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship’,
and 1956, ‘Mozart and the philosophers’; repr. (1964) Collected Papers II:
Studies in Social Theory, pp. 159–78 and 179–200. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff.
Sendler, Egon (1988) The Icon, Image of the Invisible: Elements of Theology,
Aesthetics and Technique. Translated by Fr Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach,
CA: Oakwood Publications; orig. (1981) L’Icône: Image de l’invisible. Paris:
Desclée de Brouwer.
Sénéchal, Philippe (1989) ‘Original et copie’, ronéo; orig. 1986, ‘Originale e copia.
Lo studio comparato delle statue antiche nel pensiero degli antiquari fino. al
1770’, in S. Settis (ed.), Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana. III. Della
tradizione all’archeologia. Turin: Einaudi, pp. 149–80.
SER, Ministère de la Culture (1974) Pratiques culturelles des Français,
1960–1970. Paris: La Documentation française.
SER, Ministère de la Culture (1982) Pratiques culturelles des francais, description
sociodémographique: Evolution 1973–1981. Paris: Dalloz.
Serres, Michel (1987) Statues. Paris: François Bourin.
Settis, Salvatore (1994) Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’: Interpreting the Hidden Subject.
Translated by Ellen Bianchini. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Seznec, Jean (1972) ‘Art and Literature: A Plea for Humility’, New Literary
History, 3(3), Spring 72, pp. 569–74.
Bibliography 327
Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle
and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Shepherd, John, Virden, Phil, Vulliamy, Graham and Wishart, Trevor (1977)
Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages. London: Latimer.
Silbermann, Alphons (1963) The Sociology of Music. Translated by Corbet
Stewart. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; orig. 1957.
Simpson, Charles R. (1981) Soho: The Artist in the City. Chicago, IL: The
Sloboda, John A. (1985) Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability,
Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Small, Christopher (1987) ‘Performance as Ritual: Sketch for an Enquiry into the
True Nature of a Symphony Concert’, in White (ed.), pp. 6–32.
Snyders, Georges (1968) Le Goût musical en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.
Paris: Vrin.
Souriau, Étienne (1929) ‘L’avenir de l’esthétique’, La Revue d’Esthétique.
Souriau, Étienne (2009) Les différents modes d’existence. With an Introduction by
Isabelle Stengers and Bruno. Latour. Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
pp. 195–217; orig. 1956.
Souris, André (1976) Conditions de la musique et autres écrits. Brussels: Editions
de l’Université.
Southern, Eileen (1971) The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York:
Norton & Company.
Steiner, George (1989) Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?.
London: Faber and Faber.
Stevens, Charles (1982) ‘Artists and Audiences: The Dilemma of Jazz Musicians
in the American Society’. Conference paper, Xth ISA Conference, Mexico,
August 1982.
Stocking Jr, George W. (ed.) (1985) Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and
Material Culture. Madison, WI, London: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Strauss, Anselm and Corbin, Juliet (1990) Basics of Qualitative Research:
Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. London:
Sage Publications.
Supičić, Ivo (1987) Music in Society: A Guide to the Sociology of Music.
Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987.
Szendy, Peter (2001) Écoute: Une histoire de nos oreilles. Paris: Minuit.
Taruskin, R. (1991) ‘L’ancienneté du présent et la présence du passé’,
InHarmoniques, 7, pp. 69–102.
Teil, Geneviève and Hennion, Antoine (2004) ‘Discovering Quality or Performing
Taste? A Sociology of the Amateur’, in M. Harvey, A. McMeekin and A. Warde
(eds), Qualities of Food: Alternative Theoretical and Empirical Approaches.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 19–37.
Teyssèdre, Bernard and Bourdieu, Pierre (1969) Les Sciences humaines et l’œuvre
d’art. Brussels: La Connaissance.
Thévenot, Laurent (1990) ‘L’action qui convient’, Raisons pratiques, 1, pp. 39–69.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1970) ‘Problèmes de l’énonciation’, Langages, 17, March 70,

pp. 3–11.
Tylor, Edward B. (1871) Primitive Culture. Gloucester Maine: Smith.
Urfalino, Philippe (1990) Quatre voix pour un Opéra: Une histoire de l’Opéra
Bastille. Paris: Métailié.
Valéry, Paul (1941) Tel Quel, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard.
Vander Gucht, Daniel (ed.) (1989) Art et société. Brussels: Les Éperonniers.
Vanhulst, Henri and Haine, Malou (eds) (1988) Musique et société: Hommages à
Robert Wangermée. Brussels: Université de Bruxelles.
Veilhan, Jean-Claude (1977) Les Règles de l’interprétation musicale à l’époque
baroque (XVIIe–XVIIIe s.). Paris: Alphonse Leduc.
Viala, Alain (1985) Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge
classique. Paris: Minuit.
Vignolle, Jean-Pierre (1980), ‘Mélange des genres, alchimie sociale: La production
des disques de variétés’, Sociologie du Travail, 22(2), pp. 129–51.
Voltaire, Mme du Deffand (1809) Correspondance inédite de Mme. du Deffand:
Suivie des lettres de M. de Voltaire à Mme du Deffand, Vol. 2. Paris:
Léopold Collin.
Vovelle, Michel (ed.) (1981) Les Intermédiaires culturels. Aix-en-Provence:
Université de Provence.
Wackernagel, Martin (1981) The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist:
Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press; orig. (1938) Der Lebensraum des Künstlers in der
florentinischen Renaissance: Aufgaben und Auftraggeber, Werkstatt und
Kunstmarkt. Leipzig: Seemann.
Wangermée, Robert (1948) ‘La musique ancienne contre la musique moderne’,
Polyphonie, 3, pp. 12–29.
Warnke, Martin (1993) The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist.
Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Max (1958) The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Translated
and edited by D. Martindale, J. Riedel, and J. Neuwirth. Southern Illinois
University Press; orig. (1921) Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen
des Musik, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen: Mohr.
Weber, Max (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other
Writings. Translated and edited by Peter R. Baehr and Gordon C. Wells.
London: Penguin Books; orig. 1905.
Weber, William (1975) Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of
Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna. London, Canberra and New York:
Croom Helm and Holmes & Meyer.
Weber, William (1986) ‘The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-
Century Orchestral Concerts’, in J. Peyser (ed.), The Orchestra: Origins and
Transformations. New York: Scribner, pp. 361–86.
Weber, William (1992) The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth Century
England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Repertoire. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bibliography 329
Weber, William (1997) ‘Did People Listen in the 18th Century?’, Early Music,
Nov. 97, pp. 678–91.
White, Avron Levine (ed.) (1987) Lost in Music: Culture, Style and the Musical
Event. Sociological Review Monograph 34. London and New York: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
White, Harrison C. and Cynthia, A. (1993) Canvases and Careers: Institutional
Change in the French Painting World. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press; orig. 1965.
Whyte, William F. (1943) Street Corner Society. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press.
Wicke, Peter (1990) Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics, and Society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wilkie, R. and Bradley, D. (1970) The Subsidized Theatre: Its Organization and
Audience. Glasgow: W. McLellan.
Willis, Paul E. (1972) Profane Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wittkower, Rudolf and Wittkower, Margot (2007) Born under Saturn: The
Character and Conduct of Artists from Antiquity to the French Revolution.
New York: New York Review Books; orig. Random House, 1963.
Wolff, Janett (1975) Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wolff, Janett (1981) The Social Production of Art. London: Macmillan.
Wölfflin, Heinrich (1932) Principles of Art History: The Problem of the
Development of Style in Later Art. Translated from 7th German Edition (1929)
into English by M.D. Hottinger. New York: Dover Publications; orig. 1915.
Wölfflin, Heinrich (1957) Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte: Gedrucktes und
Ungedrucktes. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; orig. 1941;
French translation Réflexions sur l’histoire de l’art, 1982. Paris: Klincksieck.
Yates, Frances A. (1975) Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century.
London: Penguin.
Yates, Frances A. (1988) The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. London:
Routledge, Chapman & Hall; orig. 1947.
Yonnet, Paul (1985) Jeux, modes et masses. Paris: Gallimard.
Zenatti, Arlette (1975) Le Développement génétique de la perception musicale.
Paris: CNRS.
Zenatti, Arlette (1981) L’Enfant et son environnement sonore. Paris: EAP.
Zilsel, E. (1993) Le Génie: Histoire d’une notion de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance.
Paris: Minuit; orig. 1926.
Zolberg, Vera L. (1990) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Index
actors 1, 30–32, 35, 37, 70, 80, 101, 109, anthropology 11, 22, 26–8, 31–2, 37,
140, 290 122–3, 200
active 115–17 arbitrariness 22, 33–4, 73, 99, 140, 200,
artists as 145–6 262
collective action 4, 36, 71, 88, 95 art 15, 19, 37
collective illusion 73 artists 105–6 see also artists
networks of 87 actors, as 145–6
reality, constructing 8, 78, 81 mediators, as 126, 143 see also
social 106 mediators
sociologies of 35–6, 81 myth of 105, 117
Adorno, T.W. 59, 69, 149, 176 autonomy of 96, 213–14
aesthetic theory 59, 60, 64, 67, 68 conditional 149–50
dialectic system of interpretation avant-garde 124–5
64, 67, 68 belief, as 74
negative dialectics 61, 63 categorisation of 69, 127, 130, 144
enunciation, no utterance without 68 class struggle, and 53–7 see also
identification with composer 66 Marxism
Mahler, on 61–4, 67 collective object, as 45–6
refusing mediation 60, 68 commissions 90, 91, 111, 116, 119–20,
writing style 65–6, 67 133, 134–5
aesthetics 4, 12, 59, 73, 79, 95–6, 103, 159 commodification of 55, 56
an- 47 continuous recomposition 148
naturalistic 149 copies 125–6, 142
negative 60 see also Adorno, T.W. disinterestedness of 134, 135
objects in 6, 99, 129 see also objects fetish, as 4
relative 88, 90, 135–6, 137, 138, history 4,10, 39, 44, 74, 101–5, 119 see
139–40 see also relativism also history of art
theory of 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68 reconciled 126
transcendental 136, 149 ideology, as 56
–sociology divide 45, 46, 71, 73–4, interpreting 150, 157–8, 159–60 see
99, 126 also interpretation
value 19, 51, 56, 78, 81, 88 see also market 78–9, 81, 116, 145, 147
value materiality of 145, 149
affinities, elective 173 mediation of 8, 10, 19, 40, 42,
Alpers, S. 126, 130, 136, 143–8 79, 103–4, 153, 158 see also
artists as mediators, on 144–5 mediation; mediators
misattribution, on 144 audiences 106–9
analysis, continuity of 9–10 mediator, as 8, 19, 50–51, 52, 59, 153
Antal, F. 109–10, 111 see also mediation; mediators
music see music
objects 37, 59, 60, 69, 75, 97, 121, 157, Bach, J.S. 167, 168–9, 247
161 see also objects Baroque nature of 254 see also
autonomy of 99 Baroque music
paintings 57, 107, 110, 116, 126, Classical, becoming 247–8 see also
127, 128–30, 135–6, 145 see also Classical music
painting grandeur of 248–50
artist as maker of 143, 144–5 historicisation of 255, 256–7
double meanings of 133 master of discourse, as 252–4
historical documents, as 131 religious dimension of 254, 255,
performance, as 146–7 300–301
professionalization 104 (trans)formation of 257–9
radicalism of 60 use of 250–52
representation 146 Baroque music 4, 165, 171, 200–201 see
resistance of 157 also interpretation; music
schools of 147 authenticity 167–8
social history of 39–40, 101–4, 105–6, Classical interpretation 4, 166, 175,
110–12, 116 176, 184, 187, 189–91, 193–4, 199,
actors in 115–17 204
audiences in 106–9 see also acts of resistance, as 191–4, 195
mediators decline of 178–80
patrons in 109–12 see also fixed object, as 165
mediators historically informed interpretation 4,
politicisation of 112–15 165–6, 169, 175, 176, 177, 182,
social interpretations of 3–4, 45–6, 70 184–6, 187–8, 189, 193–4, 200,
–society, relationship between 41–2, 204
45, 51, 54, 58, 69, 153–6, 159, production of objects in 199
296–7 objects in 171–2, 174, 205 see also
sociology of 44, 45–9, 70, 71, 74, objects
81, 96–7, 98, 101, 296 see also reinstatement of 181–2, 186
sociology reinterpretation of 4, 166, 166, 168,
conditions of production 76–7, 78 182, 284–5
disruption in 70–71 rhythm of 195
specificity of 53, 56 Bastide, R. 45–6, 47, 49, 51
status of 101 Baudrillard, J. 34, 58
value of 41, 53, 78, 81, 121, 125, Baxandall, M. 104, 127–30
139–40, 143–4, 147 see also value connections, on 129–30
worlds 86–7, 88, 101, 102, 116 continuity 130
artists 105–6, focus on practices 128
actors, as 145–6 objective 130
capacity to act 143, 144–5, 146 patrons, on 127
mediators, as 126, 143, 145 see also reciprocal processes, on 128–9
mediators visual culture 130
misattribution to 143–4 Becker, H.S. 73–4, 78, 80, 81, 85–8, 89,
myth of 117 96–7, 102, 156, 292
Attali, J. 58–9 Bessarion, Cardinal J. 132–3
belief 69, 70, 79
collective 2, 12
denial 72 see also denial
Index 333
theory of 4, 15, 36, 70–71, 99 see also constructivism 81, 101, 105, 161
Durkheim constructing reality 9, 81
production of 72, 79 critical theory 9, 17, 30–31, 32, 67, 81, 212
square of 24–5 culturalism 31, 32, 37
binary opposition 209–10 cultural domination 56, 72, 112
Boltanski, L. 36–7 cultural production 40, 61
Borrel, E. 184, 185–6, 202, 284 culture 27, 28
Bourdieu 33, 47, 70, 71–5 mass 56
delegation, on 72 sociology of 15, 17, 26, 46, 47, 77, 81,
96 see also sociology
causality 8, 10, 22, 30–31, 34, 36, 44, 115, critical 50
120, 138–9
circular 26, 31, 38, 153–4, 156, 157 Danto, A. 139, 160–63
composite 139 contextualism 161–2
external 157 definitions, instability of 87–8
given object in 153 delegation 9, 72, 73, 75
global 30, 157 see also critical theory; demystification 3, 16, 17, 19, 25, 43, 90,
structuralism 97, 99
internal 157 denegation 69, 73, 75
linear 26, 31, 38, 154–5, 156, 157 denial 12, 18, 41, 124
totemic power, of 15 see also totems theory of 33–4, 72, 96 see also belief;
real 22 Bourdieu
substitution in 153 causal power of 33, 72
causes 29, 34–5, 43, 68, 91, 101–2, 115, object, of the 2
120–21, 158 deviance, sociology of 9, 85–6, 87
apparent 22, 32 Dolmetsch, A. 184–5
attribution of 33, 35, 36, 106–7, 121 dualism 7, 8, 10, 11, 36, 37, 39, 94, 100,
circular 26, 31 134, 161 see also Durkheim
external 26, 29, 101, 294 rejecting 2, 49
intermediary 29 subject–object 3–4, 6, 296
internal 101 Durkheim 9, 19–20
linear 26, 31, 153 dualism 37, 100
mediation masking 32 see also mediation, on 15, 21, 28, 211 see also
mediation mediation
partial 158, 159 model of belief 4, 15, 19, 24, 36
class struggle, art and 53–7 causal attribution in 16
ideologies 54 cultural objects 20
circle of causalities 31 see also causality natural objects 100
civilisation of illusion 58 real objects 20
Classical music 5, 171, 165, 166, 169, 171, realities in 20
181, 192, 248, 250, 287 representation in 16, 23
classification 284 social reality, privileging 21
performance techniques 184, 189 symbolic objects 100
temporality of 195–6 theory of emblems 16 see also
collective action 4, 36, 71, 88, 95 emblems; objects; totems
collective belief 2, 3, 12 totems in 16 see also emblems;
collective construction 6, 89–90, 117 objects; totems
collective, power of the 16, 21, 22, 24, 26 Duvignaud, J. 51, 52, 98–9, 155
elective affinities 173 social 39–40, 101–4, 105–6, 110–12,

emblems 16–17, 23, 299 see also objects; 116
totems actors in 115–17
causal power of 17, 33 see also audiences in 106–9 see also
causality mediators
theory of 16, 20–21, 22, 24, 25 patrons in 109–12 see also
empiricism 32, 35–7, 48, 51–2, 65, 69, 73, mediators
80, 82, 95–6, 99, 139, 140, 155, politicisation of 112–15
158–9, 257–8, 269–70 Hope, G. 119–20
anti- 69
ethnographic analysis 35, 221 iconoclasm 73, 124–5, 138, 161
ethnology 6, 11–12, 13, 17–18, 19, 29, 34, identity 6, 29, 36, 75, 238, 242, 288
36, 52, 106, 200, 263, 283 constructing 86, 289
ethnomusicology 82, 171, 215–16 cultural 8
collective 85, 226, 238
Focillon, H. 47–8 social 268, 273
forms, life of 47–8 imaginary, the 49, 57, 70, 280
Francastel, P. 49, 50–53 hidden 51, 57
Frankfurt School, the 58, 59 problematics of 51, 52
functionalism 28, 31 social 49–53
materialism of 27 intermediaries 1, 4, 8, 9, 10, 18, 23, 39,
47, 83, 95–6, 116, 140, 199–200,
Gamboni, D. 116–17, 124–5 210, 290, 296 see also mediation;
Ginzberg, C. 131–5 mediators
connections, on 133 art, of 119, 122–6, 159
dating of art, on 134 causes 29, 103
historical approach 131–2, 134 hybrid 291–2
restoring mediators 134, 135 see also infinite 122–6, 140
mediators linear 38, 290, 291
Girard, R. 34 mediators, becoming 159
sacrifice 59 music, of 195, 200, 218, 231–2, 235,
theory of arbitrariness 33–4 237, 245–6, 286, 289
Goldmann, L. 39, 50, realities 29
Gombrich, E.H. 41, 105, 137 restoring 12, 44, 96, 99
unruly 75
Hadjinicolaou, N. 54–5 interpretation 158, 159–60, 199
Haskell, F. 43, 102, 119, 121, 122, 143, linguistic model of 16–17, 21, 25, 150,
156 282
aesthetic relativism, on 135–6, 140 see also musical 4, 165–6, 169, 175, 176, 177,
relativism 182, 184–6, 187–8, 189–91, 193–4,
causality in 138–42 199, 200, 204
composite 139 reinterpretation 4, 166, 166, 168,
Hauser, A. 156, 160 182, 284–5
history of art 4,10, 39, 44, 74, 101–5, 119, social 3–4, 19, 26, 30, 45–6, 59, 70, 81,
148–51 see also art 109, 149
mediators, restoring 148, 149, 150–51, subjective 161–2
159 see also mediators
reconciled 126
Index 335
Kula, the 21, 26 rejecting 2, 60, 65, 68

Kulturgeschichte 117 representations in 23 see also
representation
Lalo, C. 47–8, 51 restoration of 44, 160–63, 295 see also
Lévi-Strauss, C. 27–8, 93 mediators
literature 5, 116–17, 297 severing 64–5
critical 10, 11, 211 sociology of 293–4
Marxist theory of the novel 53–4 see theory of 5, 24
also Marxism the social, of 1, 7–8, 11
social history of 116 mediators 1, 3, 4, 6, 13, 30, 42–4, 48–9, 81,
101 see also intermediaries
Marcuse, H. 59, 149 active 31, 48–9, 52, 127, 134, 297
Marin, L. 150, 214, 297, 298 advisers 119–20
Marxism 56, 57, 58 art as 8, 19, 50–51, 59 see also art
theory of the novel 53–4 art, of 40, 81, 98, 104, 141
materiality 123, 135, 142, 150 artists as 126, 143, 145
art, of 142, 145, 149 audiences 5, 69, 84, 87, 106–9, 295–6
collective usages, of 199 circular 290, 291
emblems, of 23 collectors 122–3
hidden 35, 199 hidden 2, 119, 126, 206
music, of 170–71, 201, 210, 217 infinite 122–6
objects, of 35, 162, 210, 212, 216, 217 institutions 3, 80–81, 120, 121
the social, of 35 instruments 3, 174, 180, 188, 189, 218
mechanics, social 35, 37, 96 media 91, 148–9, 202
mediation 1, 3, 4, 7, 8–10, 17, 27–8, 29, musical 174, 202–7
30, 34, 65, 75, 98, 160, 173, 206, patrons 109–12, 119–22
296–300 performers 5, 174, 181
active 22–3, 27, 31, 117, 285 profusion of 5, 104
ambiguities of 9, 22, 30 recordings 5, 201–2, 218, 270–72
art, by 8, 19, 50–51, 52 see also art registers of performers 189–90
art, of 2, 4, 8, 10, 19, 42, 85, 99–100, restoration of 44, 98, 99, 116, 117,
135, 158, 160 see also art 119, 120, 123, 134, 137, 148, 175,
causes, masking 32 see also causes 288–9
character of 22–3 scores 3, 174, 180, 218
cultural 15, 21, 25, 26, 68 teachers 3, 222
definition 8 Menger, P.-M. 89–94
intersecting 101–2 Merriam, A.P. 13, 115
models of 8, 10, 20–22, 97 Molino, J. 213
music as theory of 3–6, 167–8, 245–6 Montias, J.M. 107–79, 81
musical 1, 5, 94, 174–5, 212, 297 see Moulin, R. 70, 71, 78
also music music 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 67, 180, 267, 268
negative model of 96–7 aesthetic value 6, 84 see also value
objects, by 9, 174 authenticity of 167–8 see also Baroque
objects, of 7–8, 11 music
passive 20–22, 31, 120 Baroque see Baroque music
performance 171, 175–6, 180–81, 270, cause, as 7, 241–3, 289
277 Classical see Classical music
procedures of 123–4 central, always being 5
collective construct, as 6, 89–90, power of, social determinants of 11, 12

212–13, 261, 262, 263 professionalism 84, 94
commercial–non-commercial tension rationalisation of 196–7
86 real presence, art of 218
constant recreation of 1, 3 recordings 5, 201–2, 218, 285–6
contemporary–past discontinuity 91, discomorphosis 270–72, 286
92–4 relation, as 12, 13, 281
critical theory, and 3 see also critical representation of 281–2, 286–9,
theory 290–91 see also representation
effect, as 7 rhythm 180, 182–3, 192, 195–6, 197,
embellishments 188, 192–3, 195, 146 198
emotion and 275–7, 278 rock 261–5
institutions of 112–15, 116 semiology and 213–14, 297, 299
jazz 85–6 signification of 297 see also
lovers 7, 167, 267, 269–70, 277 see signification
also taste social foundations of 12, 94–5
creative capacity of 272–5 social history of 112–14
market 91, 95 sociology, as 246, 292–4, 295
influence of 92 sociology of 82–5, 268 see also
mediation of 174–5, 200, 203, 206–7, sociology
212, 218, 295, 297 see also Supicic 82
mediation taste in 83, 268 see also taste
performances 171, 175–6, 180–81, shared object, as 3, 11
183–4, 277 subsidies for 84
recordings 170–71, 201–2, 245 taste and see taste
teaching see teaching below teaching 221, 240
mediators of 245–6, 287 see also classrooms 222–4
mediators dynamics of 228–30, 232, 235–7,
competing 287–8 239
recordings 5, 201–2, 218, 285–6 instruments 224
musicology 167, 176, 213 intermediaries/mediators of 231–2,
ethno- 171, 213, 215–16 233–4, 235, 238
natural foundations of 94–5 levelling down and 227
notation 94–5, 183, 196, 197 object of 235–7, 238
object, as 11–12, 13, 170–72, 202–3, perspectives of 237–41
205, 211, 214, 245, 270, 281, 289 psychology in 230–31
de-stabilising 204 solfège 221, 229–30, 235, 241–2
elusive 1–2, 3, 299 students 223, 225–6, 238–9
stabilising 202, 204, 212, 285–6 teacher 224–5
objects of 1–2, 3, 40, 203, 204, 210, translation, as 235–6
218–19 temporality 197–8
hybrid 217–18, 290, 291–2 theory of mediation, as 3–6, 167–8,
intrinsic materiality, no 210, 212, 245–6
216, 217 transcendent object, as 11
ornamentation 188, 192–3, 195, 146 transcription of 214–15
perpetual transformation of 268 transmission of 165, 170, 171
politicisation of 114–15 universal framework 213–14
Index 337
Urtext 192, 203, 248, 251, 254 status of 28–30, 139

violence, and 264–5 symbolic 16–17, 18, 21, 33
–visual arts, opposition 209–10 –natural distinction 100
power, of 16, 19, 22, 23–5, 141
Nattiez, J.-J. 213–14, tangible 24, 211–12, 245
nature 24, 28, 93 taste, and 204 see also taste
laws of 89, 93, 257 totems see totems
–society relationship 27, 28, 73 transforming 28, 32, 37, 55, 139, 150,
267
Object, the 5–6, 7, 25, 98–100, 203, 206 opacity of things 29, 31, 43, 150, 230,
music as 1–2, 203, 286–6 233–4, 243
objectivism 24, 33, 279
objects 1, 2, 5–6, 31, 37, 98–100, 174, 205 painting 3, 54, 107, 122, 126, 129, 130,
see also emblems; totems 143
art 2, 37, 59, 60, 69, 121, 161 see also materiality of 145
art performance, as 145–6
autonomy of 99, 206, 210 social value, as 146–7 see also value
creations of social beliefs, as 33 paintings 57, 107, 110, 116, 126, 127,
cultural 16–17, 20, 27 see also culture; 128–30, 135–6, 145 see also art
emblems; totems artist as maker of 143, 144–5
elusive 1–2, 3, 92, 107, 123, 216, 299 double meanings of 133
ethnology on 17–18 see also ethnology historical documents, as 131
fixed 12, 165, 198, 201, 202, 211, 219 performance, as 146–7
–group relationship 281–2 Panofsky, E. 108–9
hybrid/composite 38, 217–18, 290 Penny, N. 126, 140, 141, 142,
intermediary 42, 83, 237 perception, sociology of 64, 75–6
musical 1–2, 6, 11–12, 13, 170–72, positivism 18, 23, 29, 32, 34, 95, 98, 99,
202–3, 204–205 see also music 108, 213, 297
restoring 267 potlatch 26
natural 27, 33, 94 power of the collective 21, 22 see also
–symbolic distinction 100 collective
neutralising 37 profane–sacred differentiation 20, 21
–subject dualism 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 19, 37,
71 see also subjects rationalism 20, 23, 32–3, 71, 116, 197
–societies, relationships between 4, 24, demystification 17, 19, 25
281–2 false 16
opacity of 29, 31, 43, 150, 230, 233–4, reality 6, 7, 8, 20, 24, 26, 33, 36, 42, 109,
243 135, 139, 158, 224, 290–91, 293
power of 32–3, 36, 45 arbitrariness of 73
causal 17, 33 artistic 73, 86–7
symbolic 16, 19, 22, 23–5, 141 construction of 9, 81
privileged 40, 140 intermediary 29
resistance of 2, 37, 157 musical 3, 5, 82, 92, 94, 174, 201, 221,
signification of 20–21, 23, 150 see also 242, 245, 282
signification natural 37
sociological theories of 4, 5, 17–18, 36, shared 221, 245, 285
37 see also sociology social 21–3, 24, 25, 29, 73, 85, 96
stability of 139, 140 subjective 16–17
reciprocity 20–21, 23, 38, 41, 67, 75, ideological 58

114–15, 128–9, 136, 140, 153, 155, mediation as instrument of 20, 22
159, 239, 241, 245, 257–8, 282, musical 187, 197, 213–14, 217, 297
289 objects, of 20–21, 23, 150
Redon, O. 116–17 social 49, 281
reductionism 29, 36, 42–3, 52, 76, 99–100, signified–signifier divide 22, 34, 224
103, 154, 155, 158, 206, 256, signs 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 29, 34–5, 100, 282
288–9 dualism of 36, 37, 73
Marxist 45, 49, 56, 69, 70 political economy of 57–9
relativism 31–2, 136–7, 160, 203, 293 social 37, 279, 283
aesthetic 88, 90, 135–6, 137, 138, transparency/opacity of 31, 150
139–40 see also aesthetics Silbermann, A. 40, 82
autonomy in 71–2, 78, 89, 96, 161 social determinants 11, 46, 49, 71, 293
religion 15, 16, 72, 128, 133, 135, 255 art, of 11, 12, 50
demystification of 16, 17 see also taste, of 99
demystification social history of art 39–40, 101–4, 105–6,
Rembrandt 117, 126, 143–8, 249 110–12, 116 see also art
representation 8, 16, 18, 21–2, 23–4, 25–6, actors in 115–17
27, 28, 56, 78, 105, 145–6, 284, audiences in 106–9 see also mediators
297–300 patrons in 109–12 see also mediators
collective 8, 19, 20, 143 politicisation of 112–15
competing formats of 287–8, 290–91 social imaginary 49–53
dual model of 292–4 social mechanics 2, 12, 35, 37, 96
efficiency of 23 see also symbolic social representation 30, 37, 52–3, 57,
efficiency 103, 148, 283, 286 see also
interlocking 148 representation
modes of 15, 96, 143, 283, 288 social, the 1, 7, 16, 21, 22–3, 28–9, 30, 33,
music, of 218, 237, 281–2, 286–9 35, 93, 94, 99, 100, 158–9, 283
Baroque 284–5 see also Baroque art and 11, 41–2, 45, 54, 58, 68, 76, 88,
music 98, 105–6, 119, 126, 153–4, 155
natural/linear 283–4, 286, 290 see also art
political 72, 114 circularity of 78
religious 15, 16–17 imaginary 49–53
semiology of 214 mechanics of 2, 12, 35, 37, 96
social/circular 30, 37, 52–3, 57, 103, music and 11–12, 94, 268, 281 see also
148, 283, 286 music
space of 21 natural cause, as 25
substitute for presence, as 287 –object relationship 4, 24, 32, 47, 286,
theory of 27, 150–51, 214 291, 293, 296–7
power deriving from 22
sacred–profane differentiation 20, 21 screen 75
Schaeffner, A. 196, 214–15, 218, 300 virtual, as 23
Sénéchal, P. 125 society–art, relationship between 41–2, 45,
signification 20–21, 23, 50, 120, 150, 197, 51, 54, 58, 69, 153–6, 159, 296–7
216, 230 sociologism 18, 31, 42, 51, 52, 71, 90, 103,
absence of 217 143, 159, 191, 283
art, of 77, 78, 108, 109, 120 –aestheticism discourse 2, 45, 49, 69,
74, 158–9
Index 339
subordination, art of 138 performance, as 268–70, 271, 277–8,

sociology 9, 15, 17, 29, 36 279–80
art, of 2, 44, 45–9, 50, 70, 71, 74, 81, reflexive activity, as 267, 270, 279–80
96–7, 98, 101, 296 see also art relativity of 139–40, 142 see also
conditions of production 76–7, 78 relativism
disruption in 70–71 theory of mediation, music as 3–6, 167–8,
critical theory 17, 30–31, 32–5, 212 see 245–6 see also music
also critical theory Thévenot, L. 36–7
critique, of 36 totems 15, 16, 24, 27 see also emblems;
culture, of 15, 17, 19, 26, 44, 46, 47, objects
50, 66, 77, 96 see also culture power of 15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 32
demystification, and 43 demystification 17, 19, 33
deviance, of 85 theory of 2, 16, 20–21, 22, 24, 25
justification, of 37
mediation, on 3–4, 40, 42–3, 99–100 Urtext 192, 203, 248, 251, 254
see also mediation
objects in 5, 17–18, 36–7, 43, 64, 69 value 2, 99, 121, 124–5, 139–40
see also objects aesthetic 19, 51, 56, 78, 81, 88 see also
perception, of 64, 75–6 aesthetics
social analysis model 1, 2 art, of 41, 53, 61, 78, 81, 97, 121, 125,
specificity, art object, of 19, 29, 53, 81, 117 137, 139–40, 143–4, 147
cultural 56 attributed 96, 141
square of belief 24–5 intrinsic 17, 31, 141
structuralism 28–9, 30–31, 37, 47, 213, 215 music, of 6, 84
Subject, the 206 painters, of 147
subjects 12, 17, 19, 34, 46, 48, 68, 64–5, social 27, 61, 97, 146–7, 287
73, 140, 146, 210, 226, 231, 282
social 33, 47, 67 Wackernagel, M. 102, 110–12
subject–object dualism 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 19, Warnke, M. 7, 120–21
37, 71, 75, 96, 99, 149, 166, 205–6, Weber, M. 19–20, 81, 82, 84, 90, 94–5
207, 218, 242, 282 see also objects Weltanschauung 51
subjectivism 46, 47 White, C.A. 102, 104, 116
symbolic efficiency 20, 23–6 White, H.C. 102, 104, 116
taste 83, 142, 172–3, 200, 267, 279 Zeitgeist 45, 117, 128
collective construction of 190, 269 Zolberg, V.L. 81, 154
creating 259–60
emotion in 275–7
musical 183, 186–9, 190–91, 192
objects, and 204, 272–5

Antoine Hennion - The Passion For Music

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Antoine Hennion - The Passion For Music

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Passion for Music:

Gary Ansdell, Director of Education, Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, UK

Series Advisory Board:

Kenneth Aigen, Temple University, USA

Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives, is a cross-disciplinary, topic-led series

Published titles in the series

Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life

How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

copyright © 2015 Antoine Hennion, Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 9781472418104 (hbk)

List of Figures  vii

1 Lasting Things: Durkheim as a Founding Father of the

Transition Restoring the Mediators: One Method for Two Programmes  39

2 Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art  45

3 Sociology and the Art Object: Belief, Illusion, Artefacts  69

Transition Linear Causes or Circular Causalities?  153

6 The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals  165

Transition ‘Unhappy Music’ Which ‘Fade[s] Away as Soon as It Is

7 ‘What Can You Hear?’: An Ethnographic Study of a

Transition Music as a Theory of Mediation  245

8 ‘Bach Today’  247

Intermezzo A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall …  261

9 Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity  267

Conclusion: The Representation of Music: In Praise of Musical Artifice  281

Epilogue ‘Vor deinen Thron’…  295

1.1 The square of belief  25

5.1 A global, circular causality  154

7.1 A classroom  223

C.1 A given world, or a world still to be done?  282

This book is the translation of La Passion musicale, first published in 1993,

The Elusive Object of Music

It is difficult to define the object of music since it cannot be located in matter.

produced. The stability of a statue or a painting naturally dictates the critical

Of all the different sociological studies of value, it is probably the sociology of

Can social interpretations ever respect the specific processes of construction of

1. It is important to overcome the opposition between internal and external

Music’s Distaste for Critical Discourse

Music is a Theory of Mediation

In order to emphasise the importance of using mediation as a guide through the

which looked at these interpretations in the light of a theory of mediation, I present

The Work, the Group and the Mediators

The Object, Mediation, the Social: Two Contrasting Models

Collective representations … presuppose that consciousnesses act on and react

Durkheim, to whom we shall return in detail, usually expresses vigorously and

Why the Term ‘Mediation’?

things, subjects and objects, instruments, systems, languages and institutions; in

A Passion for Music: ‘Transcending the Alternatives of Unveiling

The second instance is illustrated by the extreme position of S. Arom (1985).

The main purpose of religion is not to provide a representation of the natural

Durkheim’s theory of emblems is a case in point: some cultural objects do not

1. Native peoples grant a magical power to certain things.

When the Australian is transported beyond himself … he is not prey to illusion.

This is why Durkheim’s reference to Saussure is important: his interpretation

Circles and Mirrors: Setting the Path for Critical Sociology

sociological discourses of today, which apply his ethnological hypotheses to

Once again, we are confronted with the opposition we sought to define

A Binary, Instrumental and Passive Model of Mediation

Durkheim’s theory can be divided into three main hypotheses:

scope, cultural mediation is thus also external and passive in relation to

List of Figures vii

Transition Restoring the Mediators: One Method for Two Programmes 39

2 Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art 45

3 Sociology and the Art Object: Belief, Illusion, Artefacts 69

Transition Linear Causes or Circular Causalities? 153

6 The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals 165

Transition Music as a Theory of Mediation 245

8 ‘Bach Today’ 247

Intermezzo A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall … 261

9 Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity 267

Conclusion: The Representation of Music: In Praise of Musical Artifice 281

Epilogue ‘Vor deinen Thron’… 295

1.1 The square of belief 25

5.1 A global, circular causality 154

7.1 A classroom 223

C.1 A given world, or a world still to be done? 282