The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation 9781472418104, 2014042700

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction
1 Lasting Things: Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Sociology of Culture
Transition Restoring the Mediators: One Method for Two Programmes
2 Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art
3 Sociology and the Art Object: Belief, Illusion, Artefacts
4 The Social History of Art: Reinserting the Works into Society
5 The New History of Art: The Social in the Art Work
Transition Linear Causes or Circular Causalities?
6 The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals
Transition ‘Unhappy Music’ Which ‘Fade[s] Away as Soon as It IsBorn’…: Painting-and-Objects versus Music-and-Society?
7 ‘What Can You Hear?’: An Ethnographic Study of a Solfège Lesson
Transition Music as a Theory of Mediation
8 ‘Bach Today’
Intermezzo A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall …
9 Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity
Conclusion: The Representation of Music: In Praise of Musical Artifice
Epilogue ‘Vor deinen Thron’…
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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   Preface to the English Edition   Introduction  

vii ix 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

45

Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art  

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

165

The Baroque Case: Musical Upheavals  

Transition ‘Unhappy Music’ Which ‘Fade[s] Away as Soon as It Is Born’…: Painting-and-Objects versus Music-and-Society?   7

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

209 221

Transition Music as a Theory of Mediation  

245

8

247

‘Bach Today’  

Intermezzo A Sociologist at the Zénith Concert Hall …  

261

9

267

Music Lovers: Taste as an Activity  

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   Index  

303 331

List of Figures 1.1 1.2

The square of belief   The circle of causalities  

5.1 A global, circular causality   5.2 Partial, linear causalities   5.3 The Object, the Social, partial causes: a triangle enclosing mediations  

25 31 154 155 158

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

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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 nineteenthcentury 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 JoëlMarie 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

4

The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation

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

The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation

6

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:

8

The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation 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, explicative: what is it that mediates of art?), the other circular (cultural, internal, implicative: 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.

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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, nonmediated 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’).

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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).

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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

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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

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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!

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19

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 Objects Individuals Society

Figure 1.1

Mediators

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 muchtouted 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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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 cultural ecologism

culturalism

local causality

interactionism

functionalism

sociologism

structuralism critical theory

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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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

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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

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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’.

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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 pseudosociologists 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).  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). 3

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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 sociohistorical contingencies which tangentially brushes past the absolute’, as he explains in Le Paradoxe du sociologue (1989, p. 145), implicitly criticising Menger (1983).

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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

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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).  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). 7

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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’.

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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.

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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).  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). 6

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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 JeanClaude, 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

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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.

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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 worldviews’ (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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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(‘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 selfcontemporary 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

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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).

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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.

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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  Cf. infra, p. 149, n. 37, the quotation from M.I. Makarius (1975).  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). 40 41

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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).

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(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

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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  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). 48

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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 musiclover 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.

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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 …

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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 selfanalysis, 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.

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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

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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).  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 2

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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).

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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).

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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.  Cf. his famous ‘Postscript’ on Kant in Distinction (1984a, pp. 484–502).  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.’ 10 11

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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).

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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

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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,

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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).

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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’ wellknown 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).

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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!

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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).

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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.

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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 selfevaluation, 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

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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).

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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).

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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 quasiobligatory 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 nonmusicians: 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.

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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 mediafriendly, 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.

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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.

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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 ….

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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(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.

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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 reexamining 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

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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.

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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

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• 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).

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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 ‘habitforming 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!)

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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 selfanalysis 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 fourteenthcentury Florentine painting promises to follow this programme, but fails to do

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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.

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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!

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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).

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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 nondetermined. 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

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• 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.

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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.

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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

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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 threeway 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

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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.

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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  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 prerevolutionary 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 3

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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  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 17

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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 avantgarde 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

 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. 32

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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, selfportrayal 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 generalaesthetic 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).

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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 foritself 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.

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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:

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First cause:

social

Explained effect:

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’.

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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

a specific social factor Figure 5.2

Explained variable (one among others)

a specific property of art

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)).

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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:

A global theory Historical analyses

Circular causality

Linear causalities

The sociology of culture The social history of art

Interactionism The history of art

Alternatively, if one prefers names, they can be summed up in this way:

A global theory Historical analyses

5

Circular causality

Linear causalities

Bourdieu Hauser

Becker Haskell

 Cf. ‘Historiens et sociologues aujourd’hui’, Société française de sociologie (1986).  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!). 6

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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.

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The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation 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

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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).

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• 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).

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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).

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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’

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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,

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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.

 Cf. L’Art de toucher le clavecin, by François Couperin (1716).

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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.

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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.

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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

 ‘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). 2

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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-leDuc’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 corpselike 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 instrumentand-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

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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’

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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’.

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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).

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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.

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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 nineteenthcentury 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)).

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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).

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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).

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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

 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 courezvous!’) 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.). 14

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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).

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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

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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).

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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 ‘exModerns’ 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 counterexample: 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

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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 SaintLambert 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. GeoffroyDechaume, 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).

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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  ‘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 23

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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 oldfashioned 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).

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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.

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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?

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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

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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 readymade 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).

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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 twentiethcentury 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

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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,  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). 1

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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

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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’).

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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 overexcited 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

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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

?

Figure 7.2

Teacher

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.

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Piano

?

Figure 7.3

Teacher

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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 alteregos, 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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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 –

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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 …

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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

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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 microdifference 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.

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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.

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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 semiwritten 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.

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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

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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).

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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 everreceding 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.

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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.

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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 nineteenthcentury 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).

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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 ‘BachRezeption’. Reception theory has mostly been developed in the case of literature (Iser 1978, Jauss 1982).

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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;

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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.

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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;

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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 strippeddown 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).

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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.

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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

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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 overinterpreted 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

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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 ChampsÉlysées): ‘[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

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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 nineteenthcentury 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

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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

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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 kneejerk 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

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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,

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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.

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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  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). 1

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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 ‘lowbrow’ 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).

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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

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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

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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:

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The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation 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 selfconscious, 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

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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

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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,

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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,

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The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation 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)

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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

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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’.

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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 twentiethcentury 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

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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’,

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‘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,

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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

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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 allimportant) 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.

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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  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. 4

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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, allencompassing, 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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 concertgoers, 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 selfeffacing 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

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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.

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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.

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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-asthing 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 politicotheological 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).

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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

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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.

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Index

actors 1, 30–32, 35, 37, 70, 80, 101, 109, 140, 290 active 115–17 artists as 145–6 collective action 4, 36, 71, 88, 95 collective illusion 73 networks of 87 reality, constructing 8, 78, 81 social 106 sociologies of 35–6, 81 Adorno, T.W. 59, 69, 149, 176 aesthetic theory 59, 60, 64, 67, 68 dialectic system of interpretation 64, 67, 68 negative dialectics 61, 63 enunciation, no utterance without 68 identification with composer 66 Mahler, on 61–4, 67 refusing mediation 60, 68 writing style 65–6, 67 aesthetics 4, 12, 59, 73, 79, 95–6, 103, 159 an- 47 naturalistic 149 negative 60 see also Adorno, T.W. objects in 6, 99, 129 see also objects relative 88, 90, 135–6, 137, 138, 139–40 see also relativism theory of 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68 transcendental 136, 149 –sociology divide 45, 46, 71, 73–4, 99, 126 value 19, 51, 56, 78, 81, 88 see also value affinities, elective 173 Alpers, S. 126, 130, 136, 143–8 artists as mediators, on 144–5 misattribution, on 144 analysis, continuity of 9–10 Antal, F. 109–10, 111

anthropology 11, 22, 26–8, 31–2, 37, 122–3, 200 arbitrariness 22, 33–4, 73, 99, 140, 200, 262 art 15, 19, 37 artists 105–6 see also artists actors, as 145–6 mediators, as 126, 143 see also mediators myth of 105, 117 autonomy of 96, 213–14 conditional 149–50 avant-garde 124–5 belief, as 74 categorisation of 69, 127, 130, 144 class struggle, and 53–7 see also Marxism collective object, as 45–6 commissions 90, 91, 111, 116, 119–20, 133, 134–5 commodification of 55, 56 continuous recomposition 148 copies 125–6, 142 disinterestedness of 134, 135 fetish, as 4 history 4,10, 39, 44, 74, 101–5, 119 see also history of art reconciled 126 ideology, as 56 interpreting 150, 157–8, 159–60 see also interpretation market 78–9, 81, 116, 145, 147 materiality of 145, 149 mediation of 8, 10, 19, 40, 42, 79, 103–4, 153, 158 see also mediation; mediators audiences 106–9 mediator, as 8, 19, 50–51, 52, 59, 153 see also mediation; mediators music see music

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objects 37, 59, 60, 69, 75, 97, 121, 157, 161 see also objects autonomy of 99 paintings 57, 107, 110, 116, 126, 127, 128–30, 135–6, 145 see also painting artist as maker of 143, 144–5 double meanings of 133 historical documents, as 131 performance, as 146–7 professionalization 104 radicalism of 60 representation 146 resistance of 157 schools of 147 social history of 39–40, 101–4, 105–6, 110–12, 116 actors in 115–17 audiences in 106–9 see also mediators patrons in 109–12 see also mediators politicisation of 112–15 social interpretations of 3–4, 45–6, 70 –society, relationship between 41–2, 45, 51, 54, 58, 69, 153–6, 159, 296–7 sociology of 44, 45–9, 70, 71, 74, 81, 96–7, 98, 101, 296 see also sociology conditions of production 76–7, 78 disruption in 70–71 specificity of 53, 56 status of 101 value of 41, 53, 78, 81, 121, 125, 139–40, 143–4, 147 see also value worlds 86–7, 88, 101, 102, 116 artists 105–6, actors, as 145–6 capacity to act 143, 144–5, 146 mediators, as 126, 143, 145 see also mediators misattribution to 143–4 myth of 117 Attali, J. 58–9

Bach, J.S. 167, 168–9, 247 Baroque nature of 254 see also Baroque music Classical, becoming 247–8 see also Classical music grandeur of 248–50 historicisation of 255, 256–7 master of discourse, as 252–4 religious dimension of 254, 255, 300–301 (trans)formation of 257–9 use of 250–52 Baroque music 4, 165, 171, 200–201 see also interpretation; music authenticity 167–8 Classical interpretation 4, 166, 175, 176, 184, 187, 189–91, 193–4, 199, 204 acts of resistance, as 191–4, 195 decline of 178–80 fixed object, as 165 historically informed interpretation 4, 165–6, 169, 175, 176, 177, 182, 184–6, 187–8, 189, 193–4, 200, 204 production of objects in 199 objects in 171–2, 174, 205 see also objects reinstatement of 181–2, 186 reinterpretation of 4, 166, 166, 168, 182, 284–5 rhythm of 195 Bastide, R. 45–6, 47, 49, 51 Baudrillard, J. 34, 58 Baxandall, M. 104, 127–30 connections, on 129–30 continuity 130 focus on practices 128 objective 130 patrons, on 127 reciprocal processes, on 128–9 visual culture 130 Becker, H.S. 73–4, 78, 80, 81, 85–8, 89, 96–7, 102, 156, 292 Bessarion, Cardinal J. 132–3 belief 69, 70, 79 collective 2, 12 denial 72 see also denial

Index theory of 4, 15, 36, 70–71, 99 see also Durkheim production of 72, 79 square of 24–5 binary opposition 209–10 Boltanski, L. 36–7 Borrel, E. 184, 185–6, 202, 284 Bourdieu 33, 47, 70, 71–5 delegation, on 72 causality 8, 10, 22, 30–31, 34, 36, 44, 115, 120, 138–9 circular 26, 31, 38, 153–4, 156, 157 composite 139 external 157 given object in 153 global 30, 157 see also critical theory; structuralism internal 157 linear 26, 31, 38, 154–5, 156, 157 totemic power, of 15 see also totems real 22 substitution in 153 causes 29, 34–5, 43, 68, 91, 101–2, 115, 120–21, 158 apparent 22, 32 attribution of 33, 35, 36, 106–7, 121 circular 26, 31 external 26, 29, 101, 294 intermediary 29 internal 101 linear 26, 31, 153 mediation masking 32 see also mediation partial 158, 159 class struggle, art and 53–7 ideologies 54 circle of causalities 31 see also causality civilisation of illusion 58 Classical music 5, 171, 165, 166, 169, 171, 181, 192, 248, 250, 287 classification 284 performance techniques 184, 189 temporality of 195–6 collective action 4, 36, 71, 88, 95 collective belief 2, 3, 12 collective construction 6, 89–90, 117 collective, power of the 16, 21, 22, 24, 26

333

constructivism 81, 101, 105, 161 constructing reality 9, 81 critical theory 9, 17, 30–31, 32, 67, 81, 212 culturalism 31, 32, 37 cultural domination 56, 72, 112 cultural production 40, 61 culture 27, 28 mass 56 sociology of 15, 17, 26, 46, 47, 77, 81, 96 see also sociology critical 50 Danto, A. 139, 160–63 contextualism 161–2 definitions, instability of 87–8 delegation 9, 72, 73, 75 demystification 3, 16, 17, 19, 25, 43, 90, 97, 99 denegation 69, 73, 75 denial 12, 18, 41, 124 theory of 33–4, 72, 96 see also belief; Bourdieu causal power of 33, 72 object, of the 2 deviance, sociology of 9, 85–6, 87 Dolmetsch, A. 184–5 dualism 7, 8, 10, 11, 36, 37, 39, 94, 100, 134, 161 see also Durkheim rejecting 2, 49 subject–object 3–4, 6, 296 Durkheim 9, 19–20 dualism 37, 100 mediation, on 15, 21, 28, 211 see also mediation model of belief 4, 15, 19, 24, 36 causal attribution in 16 cultural objects 20 natural objects 100 real objects 20 realities in 20 representation in 16, 23 social reality, privileging 21 symbolic objects 100 theory of emblems 16 see also emblems; objects; totems totems in 16 see also emblems; objects; totems Duvignaud, J. 51, 52, 98–9, 155

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elective affinities 173 emblems 16–17, 23, 299 see also objects; totems causal power of 17, 33 see also causality theory of 16, 20–21, 22, 24, 25 empiricism 32, 35–7, 48, 51–2, 65, 69, 73, 80, 82, 95–6, 99, 139, 140, 155, 158–9, 257–8, 269–70 anti- 69 ethnographic analysis 35, 221 ethnology 6, 11–12, 13, 17–18, 19, 29, 34, 36, 52, 106, 200, 263, 283 ethnomusicology 82, 171, 215–16 Focillon, H. 47–8 forms, life of 47–8 Francastel, P. 49, 50–53 Frankfurt School, the 58, 59 functionalism 28, 31 materialism of 27 Gamboni, D. 116–17, 124–5 Ginzberg, C. 131–5 connections, on 133 dating of art, on 134 historical approach 131–2, 134 restoring mediators 134, 135 see also mediators Girard, R. 34 sacrifice 59 theory of arbitrariness 33–4 Goldmann, L. 39, 50, Gombrich, E.H. 41, 105, 137 Hadjinicolaou, N. 54–5 Haskell, F. 43, 102, 119, 121, 122, 143, 156 aesthetic relativism, on 135–6, 140 see also relativism causality in 138–42 composite 139 Hauser, A. 156, 160 history of art 4,10, 39, 44, 74, 101–5, 119, 148–51 see also art mediators, restoring 148, 149, 150–51, 159 see also mediators reconciled 126

social 39–40, 101–4, 105–6, 110–12, 116 actors in 115–17 audiences in 106–9 see also mediators patrons in 109–12 see also mediators politicisation of 112–15 Hope, G. 119–20 iconoclasm 73, 124–5, 138, 161 identity 6, 29, 36, 75, 238, 242, 288 constructing 86, 289 cultural 8 collective 85, 226, 238 social 268, 273 imaginary, the 49, 57, 70, 280 hidden 51, 57 problematics of 51, 52 social 49–53 intermediaries 1, 4, 8, 9, 10, 18, 23, 39, 47, 83, 95–6, 116, 140, 199–200, 210, 290, 296 see also mediation; mediators art, of 119, 122–6, 159 causes 29, 103 hybrid 291–2 infinite 122–6, 140 linear 38, 290, 291 mediators, becoming 159 music, of 195, 200, 218, 231–2, 235, 237, 245–6, 286, 289 realities 29 restoring 12, 44, 96, 99 unruly 75 interpretation 158, 159–60, 199 linguistic model of 16–17, 21, 25, 150, 282 musical 4, 165–6, 169, 175, 176, 177, 182, 184–6, 187–8, 189–91, 193–4, 199, 200, 204 reinterpretation 4, 166, 166, 168, 182, 284–5 social 3–4, 19, 26, 30, 45–6, 59, 70, 81, 109, 149 subjective 161–2

Index Kula, the 21, 26 Kulturgeschichte 117 Lalo, C. 47–8, 51 Lévi-Strauss, C. 27–8, 93 literature 5, 116–17, 297 critical 10, 11, 211 Marxist theory of the novel 53–4 see also Marxism social history of 116 Marcuse, H. 59, 149 Marin, L. 150, 214, 297, 298 Marxism 56, 57, 58 theory of the novel 53–4 materiality 123, 135, 142, 150 art, of 142, 145, 149 collective usages, of 199 emblems, of 23 hidden 35, 199 music, of 170–71, 201, 210, 217 objects, of 35, 162, 210, 212, 216, 217 the social, of 35 mechanics, social 35, 37, 96 mediation 1, 3, 4, 7, 8–10, 17, 27–8, 29, 30, 34, 65, 75, 98, 160, 173, 206, 296–300 active 22–3, 27, 31, 117, 285 ambiguities of 9, 22, 30 art, by 8, 19, 50–51, 52 see also art art, of 2, 4, 8, 10, 19, 42, 85, 99–100, 135, 158, 160 see also art causes, masking 32 see also causes character of 22–3 cultural 15, 21, 25, 26, 68 definition 8 intersecting 101–2 models of 8, 10, 20–22, 97 music as theory of 3–6, 167–8, 245–6 musical 1, 5, 94, 174–5, 212, 297 see also music negative model of 96–7 objects, by 9, 174 objects, of 7–8, 11 passive 20–22, 31, 120 performance 171, 175–6, 180–81, 270, 277 procedures of 123–4

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rejecting 2, 60, 65, 68 representations in 23 see also representation restoration of 44, 160–63, 295 see also mediators severing 64–5 sociology of 293–4 theory of 5, 24 the social, of 1, 7–8, 11 mediators 1, 3, 4, 6, 13, 30, 42–4, 48–9, 81, 101 see also intermediaries active 31, 48–9, 52, 127, 134, 297 advisers 119–20 art as 8, 19, 50–51, 59 see also art art, of 40, 81, 98, 104, 141 artists as 126, 143, 145 audiences 5, 69, 84, 87, 106–9, 295–6 circular 290, 291 collectors 122–3 hidden 2, 119, 126, 206 infinite 122–6 institutions 3, 80–81, 120, 121 instruments 3, 174, 180, 188, 189, 218 media 91, 148–9, 202 musical 174, 202–7 patrons 109–12, 119–22 performers 5, 174, 181 profusion of 5, 104 recordings 5, 201–2, 218, 270–72 registers of performers 189–90 restoration of 44, 98, 99, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 134, 137, 148, 175, 288–9 scores 3, 174, 180, 218 teachers 3, 222 Menger, P.-M. 89–94 Merriam, A.P. 13, 115 Molino, J. 213 Montias, J.M. 107–79, 81 Moulin, R. 70, 71, 78 music 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 67, 180, 267, 268 aesthetic value 6, 84 see also value authenticity of 167–8 see also Baroque music Baroque see Baroque music cause, as 7, 241–3, 289 Classical see Classical music central, always being 5

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The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation collective construct, as 6, 89–90, 212–13, 261, 262, 263 commercial–non-commercial tension 86 constant recreation of 1, 3 contemporary–past discontinuity 91, 92–4 critical theory, and 3 see also critical theory effect, as 7 embellishments 188, 192–3, 195, 146 emotion and 275–7, 278 institutions of 112–15, 116 jazz 85–6 lovers 7, 167, 267, 269–70, 277 see also taste creative capacity of 272–5 market 91, 95 influence of 92 mediation of 174–5, 200, 203, 206–7, 212, 218, 295, 297 see also mediation performances 171, 175–6, 180–81, 183–4, 277 recordings 170–71, 201–2, 245 teaching see teaching below mediators of 245–6, 287 see also mediators competing 287–8 recordings 5, 201–2, 218, 285–6 musicology 167, 176, 213 ethno- 171, 213, 215–16 natural foundations of 94–5 notation 94–5, 183, 196, 197 object, as 11–12, 13, 170–72, 202–3, 205, 211, 214, 245, 270, 281, 289 de-stabilising 204 elusive 1–2, 3, 299 stabilising 202, 204, 212, 285–6 objects of 1–2, 3, 40, 203, 204, 210, 218–19 hybrid 217–18, 290, 291–2 intrinsic materiality, no 210, 212, 216, 217 ornamentation 188, 192–3, 195, 146 perpetual transformation of 268 politicisation of 114–15

power of, social determinants of 11, 12 professionalism 84, 94 rationalisation of 196–7 real presence, art of 218 recordings 5, 201–2, 218, 285–6 discomorphosis 270–72, 286 relation, as 12, 13, 281 representation of 281–2, 286–9, 290–91 see also representation rhythm 180, 182–3, 192, 195–6, 197, 198 rock 261–5 semiology and 213–14, 297, 299 signification of 297 see also signification social foundations of 12, 94–5 social history of 112–14 sociology, as 246, 292–4, 295 sociology of 82–5, 268 see also sociology Supicic 82 taste in 83, 268 see also taste shared object, as 3, 11 subsidies for 84 taste and see taste teaching 221, 240 classrooms 222–4 dynamics of 228–30, 232, 235–7, 239 instruments 224 intermediaries/mediators of 231–2, 233–4, 235, 238 levelling down and 227 object of 235–7, 238 perspectives of 237–41 psychology in 230–31 solfège 221, 229–30, 235, 241–2 students 223, 225–6, 238–9 teacher 224–5 translation, as 235–6 temporality 197–8 theory of mediation, as 3–6, 167–8, 245–6 transcendent object, as 11 transcription of 214–15 transmission of 165, 170, 171 universal framework 213–14

Index Urtext 192, 203, 248, 251, 254 violence, and 264–5 –visual arts, opposition 209–10 Nattiez, J.-J. 213–14, nature 24, 28, 93 laws of 89, 93, 257 –society relationship 27, 28, 73 Object, the 5–6, 7, 25, 98–100, 203, 206 music as 1–2, 203, 286–6 objectivism 24, 33, 279 objects 1, 2, 5–6, 31, 37, 98–100, 174, 205 see also emblems; totems art 2, 37, 59, 60, 69, 121, 161 see also art autonomy of 99, 206, 210 creations of social beliefs, as 33 cultural 16–17, 20, 27 see also culture; emblems; totems elusive 1–2, 3, 92, 107, 123, 216, 299 ethnology on 17–18 see also ethnology fixed 12, 165, 198, 201, 202, 211, 219 –group relationship 281–2 hybrid/composite 38, 217–18, 290 intermediary 42, 83, 237 musical 1–2, 6, 11–12, 13, 170–72, 202–3, 204–205 see also music restoring 267 natural 27, 33, 94 –symbolic distinction 100 neutralising 37 –subject dualism 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 19, 37, 71 see also subjects –societies, relationships between 4, 24, 281–2 opacity of 29, 31, 43, 150, 230, 233–4, 243 power of 32–3, 36, 45 causal 17, 33 symbolic 16, 19, 22, 23–5, 141 privileged 40, 140 resistance of 2, 37, 157 signification of 20–21, 23, 150 see also signification sociological theories of 4, 5, 17–18, 36, 37 see also sociology stability of 139, 140

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status of 28–30, 139 symbolic 16–17, 18, 21, 33 –natural distinction 100 power, of 16, 19, 22, 23–5, 141 tangible 24, 211–12, 245 taste, and 204 see also taste totems see totems transforming 28, 32, 37, 55, 139, 150, 267 opacity of things 29, 31, 43, 150, 230, 233–4, 243 painting 3, 54, 107, 122, 126, 129, 130, 143 materiality of 145 performance, as 145–6 social value, as 146–7 see also value paintings 57, 107, 110, 116, 126, 127, 128–30, 135–6, 145 see also art artist as maker of 143, 144–5 double meanings of 133 historical documents, as 131 performance, as 146–7 Panofsky, E. 108–9 Penny, N. 126, 140, 141, 142, perception, sociology of 64, 75–6 positivism 18, 23, 29, 32, 34, 95, 98, 99, 108, 213, 297 potlatch 26 power of the collective 21, 22 see also collective profane–sacred differentiation 20, 21 rationalism 20, 23, 32–3, 71, 116, 197 demystification 17, 19, 25 false 16 reality 6, 7, 8, 20, 24, 26, 33, 36, 42, 109, 135, 139, 158, 224, 290–91, 293 arbitrariness of 73 artistic 73, 86–7 construction of 9, 81 intermediary 29 musical 3, 5, 82, 92, 94, 174, 201, 221, 242, 245, 282 natural 37 shared 221, 245, 285 social 21–3, 24, 25, 29, 73, 85, 96 subjective 16–17

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reciprocity 20–21, 23, 38, 41, 67, 75, 114–15, 128–9, 136, 140, 153, 155, 159, 239, 241, 245, 257–8, 282, 289 Redon, O. 116–17 reductionism 29, 36, 42–3, 52, 76, 99–100, 103, 154, 155, 158, 206, 256, 288–9 Marxist 45, 49, 56, 69, 70 relativism 31–2, 136–7, 160, 203, 293 aesthetic 88, 90, 135–6, 137, 138, 139–40 see also aesthetics autonomy in 71–2, 78, 89, 96, 161 religion 15, 16, 72, 128, 133, 135, 255 demystification of 16, 17 see also demystification Rembrandt 117, 126, 143–8, 249 representation 8, 16, 18, 21–2, 23–4, 25–6, 27, 28, 56, 78, 105, 145–6, 284, 297–300 collective 8, 19, 20, 143 competing formats of 287–8, 290–91 dual model of 292–4 efficiency of 23 see also symbolic efficiency interlocking 148 modes of 15, 96, 143, 283, 288 music, of 218, 237, 281–2, 286–9 Baroque 284–5 see also Baroque music natural/linear 283–4, 286, 290 political 72, 114 religious 15, 16–17 semiology of 214 social/circular 30, 37, 52–3, 57, 103, 148, 283, 286 space of 21 substitute for presence, as 287 theory of 27, 150–51, 214 sacred–profane differentiation 20, 21 Schaeffner, A. 196, 214–15, 218, 300 Sénéchal, P. 125 signification 20–21, 23, 50, 120, 150, 197, 216, 230 absence of 217 art, of 77, 78, 108, 109, 120

ideological 58 mediation as instrument of 20, 22 musical 187, 197, 213–14, 217, 297 objects, of 20–21, 23, 150 social 49, 281 signified–signifier divide 22, 34, 224 signs 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 29, 34–5, 100, 282 dualism of 36, 37, 73 political economy of 57–9 social 37, 279, 283 transparency/opacity of 31, 150 Silbermann, A. 40, 82 social determinants 11, 46, 49, 71, 293 art, of 11, 12, 50 taste, of 99 social history of art 39–40, 101–4, 105–6, 110–12, 116 see also art actors in 115–17 audiences in 106–9 see also mediators patrons in 109–12 see also mediators politicisation of 112–15 social imaginary 49–53 social mechanics 2, 12, 35, 37, 96 social representation 30, 37, 52–3, 57, 103, 148, 283, 286 see also representation social, the 1, 7, 16, 21, 22–3, 28–9, 30, 33, 35, 93, 94, 99, 100, 158–9, 283 art and 11, 41–2, 45, 54, 58, 68, 76, 88, 98, 105–6, 119, 126, 153–4, 155 see also art circularity of 78 imaginary 49–53 mechanics of 2, 12, 35, 37, 96 music and 11–12, 94, 268, 281 see also music natural cause, as 25 –object relationship 4, 24, 32, 47, 286, 291, 293, 296–7 power deriving from 22 screen 75 virtual, as 23 society–art, relationship between 41–2, 45, 51, 54, 58, 69, 153–6, 159, 296–7 sociologism 18, 31, 42, 51, 52, 71, 90, 103, 143, 159, 191, 283 –aestheticism discourse 2, 45, 49, 69, 74, 158–9

Index subordination, art of 138 sociology 9, 15, 17, 29, 36 art, of 2, 44, 45–9, 50, 70, 71, 74, 81, 96–7, 98, 101, 296 see also art conditions of production 76–7, 78 disruption in 70–71 critical theory 17, 30–31, 32–5, 212 see also critical theory critique, of 36 culture, of 15, 17, 19, 26, 44, 46, 47, 50, 66, 77, 96 see also culture demystification, and 43 deviance, of 85 justification, of 37 mediation, on 3–4, 40, 42–3, 99–100 see also mediation objects in 5, 17–18, 36–7, 43, 64, 69 see also objects perception, of 64, 75–6 social analysis model 1, 2 specificity, art object, of 19, 29, 53, 81, 117 cultural 56 square of belief 24–5 structuralism 28–9, 30–31, 37, 47, 213, 215 Subject, the 206 subjects 12, 17, 19, 34, 46, 48, 68, 64–5, 73, 140, 146, 210, 226, 231, 282 social 33, 47, 67 subject–object dualism 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 19, 37, 71, 75, 96, 99, 149, 166, 205–6, 207, 218, 242, 282 see also objects subjectivism 46, 47 symbolic efficiency 20, 23–6 taste 83, 142, 172–3, 200, 267, 279 collective construction of 190, 269 creating 259–60 emotion in 275–7 musical 183, 186–9, 190–91, 192 objects, and 204, 272–5

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performance, as 268–70, 271, 277–8, 279–80 reflexive activity, as 267, 270, 279–80 relativity of 139–40, 142 see also relativism theory of mediation, music as 3–6, 167–8, 245–6 see also music Thévenot, L. 36–7 totems 15, 16, 24, 27 see also emblems; objects power of 15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 32 demystification 17, 19, 33 theory of 2, 16, 20–21, 22, 24, 25 Urtext 192, 203, 248, 251, 254 value 2, 99, 121, 124–5, 139–40 aesthetic 19, 51, 56, 78, 81, 88 see also aesthetics art, of 41, 53, 61, 78, 81, 97, 121, 125, 137, 139–40, 143–4, 147 attributed 96, 141 intrinsic 17, 31, 141 music, of 6, 84 painters, of 147 social 27, 61, 97, 146–7, 287 Wackernagel, M. 102, 110–12 Warnke, M. 7, 120–21 Weber, M. 19–20, 81, 82, 84, 90, 94–5 Weltanschauung 51 White, C.A. 102, 104, 116 White, H.C. 102, 104, 116 Zeitgeist 45, 117, 128 Zolberg, V.L. 81, 154