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Antoine Hennion

Bio: Antoine Hennion is an academic researcher from Mines ParisTech. The author has contributed to research in topics: Taste (sociology) & Popular music. The author has an hindex of 27, co-authored 89 publications receiving 3000 citations. Previous affiliations of Antoine Hennion include PSL Research University & École Normale Supérieure.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider dispositifs and their constraints to be generative: they do not simply reduce but also reveal and multiply the capacity of a subject to create and make use of new capacities.
Abstract: After describing objects as networks, we attempt to describe ‘subject-networks’. Instead of focusing on capacities inherent in a subject, we attend instead to the tactics and techniques which make possible the emergence of a subject as it enters a ‘dispositif’. Opting for an optimistic analysis of Foucault, we consider ‘dispositifs’ and their constraints to be generative: they do not simply reduce but also reveal and multiply. The generative power of ‘dispositifs’ depends upon their capacity to create and make use of new capacities in the persons who pass through them. Drawing upon a diverse body of literature and upon fieldwork among drug addicts and music amateurs, we show how this point of entry into the question of the subject immediately and irredeemably undoes traditional dichotomies of sociology. It becomes impossible to continue to set up oppositions like those of agent/structure, subject/object, active/passive, free/determined. We also have to look beyond studies of ‘action’ and describe ‘events’...

412 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste -but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste - but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided. Objects of taste are not present, inert, available and at our service.They give themselves up, they shy away, they impose themselves. ‘Amateurs’ do not believe things have taste. On the contrary, they make themselves detect them, through a continuous elaboration of procedures that put taste to the test. Understood as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered (as with so-called ‘critical’ sociology) an arbitrary election which has to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.

396 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers, focusing on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste ''already there''.
Abstract: This article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived only as the explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste `already there', for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely recording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works.

274 citations

MonographDOI

190 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors follow the producer of popular records, as an interface between music and its market, through a double task of giving its form to the product and the interesting people within it, representing the public to the artist and the music to the media.
Abstract: Trying to reduce the divide between culture and science, this article follows the producer of popular records, as an interface between music and its market. Like the innovator when he does not obey scientific, technical, and commercial reasons in succession, but reshapes them all together through a double task of giving its form to the product and the interesting people within it, the producer represents the public to the artist and the music to the media. First in a local scale, then in larger and larger ones, alone with the singer, in the studio, and into the media, this sociology of the intermediary shows the producer experimentally organizing, as in a laboratory, a complete production-consumption cycle. Success is then not the mysterious leap to the public, but the last extension of an equation into which the public has been incorporated in many forms from the very beginning.

164 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
John Law1
01 Aug 1992
TL;DR: The actor-network theory as discussed by the authors is a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social.
Abstract: This paper describes the theory of the actor-network, a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects. The theory is distinctive because it insists that networks are materially heterogeneous and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social. Agents, texts, devices, architectures are all generated in, form part of, and are essential to, the networks of the social. And in the first instance, all should be analyzed in the same terms. Accordingly, in this view, the task of sociology is to characterize the ways in which materials join together to generate themselves and reproduce institutional and organizational patterns in the networks of the social.

2,439 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Bourdieu as mentioned in this paper presents a combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg..., which is a collection of interviews with Bourdieu.
Abstract: By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

2,238 citations

Book
Tia DeNora1
01 Jan 2000
TL;DR: Music in Everyday Life as mentioned in this paper uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency.
Abstract: The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

1,638 citations

Book ChapterDOI
John Law1
02 Mar 2009
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the development of actor-network theory and feminist material semiotics by exploring case studies within Science and Technology Studies (STS), and note that STS develops its theoretical approaches through empirical case studies, and unless this is understood it is difficult to understand the significance of 'actor network theory' or any other STS theory or approach.
Abstract: This chapter describes the development of actor-network theory and feminist material semiotics by exploring case studies within STS (science and technology studies). It notes that STS (and so material semiotics) develops its theoretical approaches through empirical case studies, and notes that unless this is understood it is difficult to understand the significance of 'actor network theory' or any other STS theory or approach.

1,460 citations