Consumption Markets & Culture

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Researching taste: an interview of Antoine

Hennion

Anissa Pomiès & Antoine Hennion

To cite this article: Anissa Pomiès & Antoine Hennion (2021) Researching taste: an
interview of Antoine Hennion, Consumption Markets & Culture, 24:1, 118-123, DOI:
10.1080/10253866.2020.1802259

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CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE
2021, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 118–123
https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2020.1802259

Researching taste: an interview of Antoine Hennion

Anissa Pomièsa and Antoine Hennion b

a
Emlyon Business School, Lifestyle Research Center, Ecully, France; bCentre de Sociologie de l’Innovation – Mines-
Paris Tech, PSL/CNRS, Paris, France

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Antoine Hennion is a Professor of Sociology at the Centre de Sociologie de Received 22 July 2020
l’Innovation (Mines-Paris Tech, PSL/CNRS). He has been researching taste Accepted 24 July 2020
and cultural practices through a pragmatic lens for three decades. He
KEYWORDS
has developed an original and impactful theoretical framework bridging Taste; pragmatism; Actor-
the Actor-Network Theory to Cultural Studies. More precisely, he Network theory; mediation;
reconceptualized the notions of mediation and attachment. Antoine attachment; music
Hennion has explored various empirical settings, including music, wine,
and sports. More recently, he has contributed to a large research project
on migration. His books and academic articles have had an impact on
Sociology, and are getting greater attention in consumer research.

On the current debate on taste

Anissa: Antoine, according to you, what is missing in the current academic debate on taste and cul-
tural practices?

Antoine: It is rather easy to say what is missing in a few words: consideration of things themselves.
That being said, it is a different kettle of fish to clarify the consequences of a lack of consideration of
things. Taste is an area in which dualist oppositions are particularly strong: external analyses vs.
internal analyses, physical properties of objects vs. social construction of preferences, focus on the
analysis of artworks and cultural products vs. focus on the social determination of tastes. Our aca-
demic fields, including philosophy, semiology, and anthropology, have been structured around
founding dualisms: object/subject, thing/sign, nature/culture, Science/social sciences. Dualism has
been particularly strong in France with the two successive waves of structuralism, and critical soci-
ology afterwards. Nowadays, dualism takes more diverse forms, as one can notice in fields like behav-
ioral and cognitive sciences, and it seems like dualism has spread instead of expiring. When it comes
to define what matters ultimately, mutual accusations of reductionism fuse on all sides. That is
exactly what the myriad of – isms is made for!
Let’s talk about dualism. Dualist oppositions are paradoxical, especially in the case of taste. The
word taste does not provide a distinction between things (which are tasted) and people (who taste). I
have been challenging such dusty oppositions since my very first works on music. Music is so elusive
that a theory of mediation was needed to grasp it. In my theory of mediation, everything that is set up
for music to happen at a precise time and place is taken seriously. In my view, pragmatic approaches
are trendy nowadays because of their ability to take a myriad of elements into account. Although
pragmatic approaches encompass diverse goals, they all emphasize practices, experiences, actors’
skills, and openness of things. I finish my sentence with the idea of openness of things on purpose.

CONTACT Anissa Pomiès [email protected] emlyon business school, lifestyle research center, 23 Avenue Guy de
Collongue, 69130 Ecully, France
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 119

The openness of things is certainly the most radical part of pragmatism – at least the one defined by
the philosopher William James. Pragmatism is not just a theory of practices. Pragmatism is based on
the key notion of pragmata, which stresses that things are always in the making, in plural and open
world made of heterogeneous yet connected realities that rely on each other.
This is my initial warning. We do need to pay more attention to things themselves. Yet, it requires
to realize how enormous this task is: we have to emphasize the ability of things to make suggestions,
to open up to us, and to extend the boundaries of the domain of reality. We should not reduce things
to lifeless targets of our systems of measure. We should not view them as mere surfaces on which we
can project our desires neither.

Conceptual clarifications
Anissa: Amateur is a major concept in your work. Yet, this word has a specific meaning in English.
That is why international consumer researchers tend to use other notions like aficionado, fan, pas-
sionate consumer and connoisseur. Could you clarify what an amateur is? Also, to what extent the
concept of amateur is different from the alternative notions I mentioned?

Antoine: It is funny that the French language has (partly) kept a specific meaning besides something
that is merely non-professional. In that sense, the word amateur is kind of similar to the word aficio-
nado. Yet, in French, amateur can also mean rough when it is used to talk about an artwork or a
performance. Let’s have a look at the list of words you mentioned. On one hand, there are fan
and enthusiast; on the other hand, there are connoisseur and consumer. All these words perpetuate
a dualistic vision of taste. Either they stress the excitement of a believer sent into raptures; or they
stress knowledge and utilitarianism that are characteristic of calculative users. When we use it prop-
erly, the word amateur has the big advantage of going beyond dualism. It highlights the paradoxical
dimension of taste: we are made by taste as much as we make taste. Taste is not about ticking a box in
a table of preferences. Taste is not about perfectly mastering an activity that one loves. Rather, taste is
all about letting it go and being carried away. Once again, if what I say sounds surprising, this is only
because one may have dualistic preconceptions in mind. Amateurs are not more or less active along a
linear scale. They are both very passive and very active! They need to continuously and creatively
reshape their techniques, reinvent their trainings, and refine their knowledge because things are
never exactly what amateurs expect from them. The more amateurs devote themselves to an area,
the more said area reveals small details that are invisible to outsiders.
Sports is an ideal case to fully understand how relevant the word amateur is. Sports is more accu-
rate than any other noble (and therefore highly socialized) product such as artworks, or carnal (and
therefore highly naturalized) products such as food. What would be football or tennis if we could
guess the outcome of a game? Despite uncertain outcomes, practice, tactics, training of bodies are
still needed. Beyond that, an entire institution is involved in football including rules, conventions,
stadiums, training centers, quarrels, styles, excesses, and marketers. It is not a question of deciding
what matters, or not, between bodies, collectives, dispositifs and institutions, and social beliefs. It is
rather a question of following how things hold themselves together to grasp relevant different facets
of a shared entity, which is football in this case. Let’s go back to dualism: is the feeling of a leather ball
social or physical? Same question with a body that jumps over a bar with the aid of a pole: is it social
or physical? Although sports seem not to care about philosophy, sports give us a brilliant lesson on
ontology. The more a particular world develops its own heterogeneous forms made of all sorts of
objects, devices and practices, the less this world is certain and definite. That is exactly why it is
appealing to amateurs!

Anissa: Attachment is another core concept of the theoretical framework you have designed. In con-
sumer research, we use this concept to study emotional bonds linking consumers to commercial set-
tings, such as a restaurant for example. In your approach, what is an attachment exactly?
120 A. POMIÈS AND A. HENNION

Antoine: Nice transition with the previous question on amateurs! The word amateur presupposes
the collectively established interest in an object. A contrario, the word attachment broadens the
scope to everything that holds us while tying us together. The notion of attachment comes from
behavioral psychology, that’s why initially it had an individual, affective meaning. It can refer to
someone’s attachment to their mother like in the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, and even in the
work of Cyrulnik. The way I use attachment is quite different, and maybe more interesting for
researchers in sociology and cultural studies. Just like the notion of care in the work of Tronto, I
think that attachment is a fruitful word because it enables us to go beyond a deadly dichotomy: pas-
sive/active. By the way, the said dualism has killed several other notions like dependence by reducing
it to a fruitless opposition between constraint and freedom. In the word attachment, the suffix – ment
shows that the dichotomy is surmounted. Indeed, attachment is what holds someone captive because
of their education, their background, or their habits. Please note that habits is a key concept of the
pragmatist approach theorized by several philosophers from William James to George Herbert
Mead. Contrary to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus that reduces habits to hidden or denied determin-
isms, the pragmatist approach is in line with Saint Thomas, and considers that habits have the
capacity to evolve while making people do something. We modify habits through our belief in
what can happen unexpectedly. Of course, attachment is also what holds us up, what makes us be
what we are. We are not the outcome of completely deliberate, individual decisions. Rather, we
are the outcome of a series of slightly different experiences that happen over time. The suffix –
ment stresses that attachment is not a bond that we simply accept. We have to participate in our
attachment to be attached. We need to work hard to be able to let go of what is happening.
The notion of attachment is close to the notion of taste. Both notions share some commonalities:
we do not control what is happening, and we do not control the surprises that attachment or taste
can bring. Despite everything, both attachment and taste require and produce adjustments that
transform and refine them. Sometimes, said modifications lead attachment and taste to fade. Won-
dering who pilots this vessel would be a waste of time. However, work, time, readiness, personal
trials, and collective activities are needed to open oneself to unexpected offers that an object of
taste or of passion can make. That’s undeniable. In my view, the word attachment clearly shows
that having a binary approach to amateurs would be a complete mistake. We cannot separate and
contrast passive entities that are constrained by their passion with active entities proclaiming that
they fully control their preferences.
The radical uncertainty of worlds in the making does not contradict with our multiple determin-
isms. Quite the contrary! The radical uncertainty of worlds in the making simply reminds us that our
multiple determinisms are not mechanical causalities. They have to be actualized; they have to be
made present. Darwin’s true discovery consists in stating that an absolute indeterminism does not
prevent rigorous sciences from existing. Physicists and climatologists can understand this idea better
than any sociologist. The law of gravity does not prevent a tiny grain of sand from bifurcating the
world into an unexpected direction. That is why I dare to use the word ontology about sports: foot-
ballers do know what I am talking about, just like chefs and concert pianists.

Researching music and other artistic forms

Anissa: You have spent many years working on musical practices. To what extent is researching
music different from, or similar to, researching painting and reading practices?

Antoine: Music is the art of time. I do not contrast music with other artistic forms based on
objects that are, let’s say, more static. It is a classic disputatio associating sound to time, and vision
to space. Again, we need to stop being obsessed with classifying everything; we need to stop being
focused on dualisms. Although each form of art cannot be reduced to a specific set of character-
istics or measures, it can be useful to play with differences between forms of art to better under-
stand each of them. I recently wrote a piece about sociologists and the way they perceive people’s
 CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 121

beliefs in objects. I do not think that I have produced a sociology of music. Rather, I think I have
pulled a sociology out of music, a sociology that music was holding out to me. This sociology
focuses on the actualized experience of things. It can therefore highlight some important, yet
unobvious, elements at stake in paintings and reading: the face-to-face interaction between some-
one and a painting, and the strange experience of deliberately retreating into a universe offered by
a written text.
That being said, music is an ideal case to understand, with one’s body, what the present means.
Despite the presence of all the requirements, music is radically undetermined. Pianists whose
hands are shaking before going on stage know that nothing matters more than the present.
Music requires all kinds of mediations to happen: instruments, trained bodies, stages, bounded
space–time, media, direct and indirect audiences. Even if all the conditions are met, nobody
can guess whether music will happen … or not. It’s hard to explain this phenomenon with
words, but it is crucial though. The notion of experience is absolutely central. It’s all about
“what is going on here” as a radical irreducibility. Can’t it be a good way to grasp the experience
of reading a book? The readers’ lack of attention, their inability to “enter” a book; or on the con-
trary, their difficulty to leave a book that has captured them, all these elements are ways to grasp
books and readers together. In so doing, we can view reading as an experience in the manner of de
Certeau. Theories of reading as an experience go beyond the dualistic opposition between texts
and readers. They avoid the pitfall of theories focused on text analyses in which readers are over-
looked. They also avoid the pitfall of theories of readers, like the ones designed by Iser and Jauss,
in which readers are producing the texts.
I will not talk more about painting because the need to bypass the traditional contrast between
painting and music was a central argument of my book The Passion for Music. The book starts
with a famous quote from Leonard de Vinci about music fading immediately after being produced.
I build against de Vinci’s quote, and step by step, I show that fragility is not a weakness of music, but
rather a strength. The experience of music requires one to continuously maintain while renewing
mediations. Maintaining mediations while renewing them is the mechanism that sustains music
and makes it last over time. Once again, there is no big difference from any other artistic form:
the same mechanism has to happen in any case, with specificities from an artistic form to another
though. Mediations are always necessary. They are an essential part of attending a concert, just like
they are an essential part of the experience of facing a painting. Art historians are good at showing
how much any “given” painting is constantly changing over the course of its trajectory, not only at a
symbolic and social level, but also at the most material one.
Joël-Marie Fauquet and I have analyzed in the same way the case of Bach in France while focusing
on the nineteenth century. At that time, Bach was progressively established as the father of music.
Bach was not simply recognized for being a genius; nor was he “socially constructed” as a great
man. An entire musical world has been progressively produced which includes amateurs, classics,
concert halls, and so on. All these elements are in contradiction with what music used to be when
Bach was alive. From a Bach who wrote high-quality music to better honor God, we moved on to
a Bach whose faith guarantees us that he made good music!
Is the situation different in the case of a priceless painting that moves from one exhibition to
another, that is reproduced everywhere, and that has become a symbol of art although it used to
be hung in a humble church in Tuscany to facilitate prayers? It is the same key idea: an experience
strongly anchored in the past needs to be continuously reactualized to last, and matters only through
the experience it can elicit now. Reading is a particular soliloquy featuring an absent author and a
present reader. The case of reading sheds light on the strength of intimacy, and the way readers recre-
ate in the mind some worlds suggested by texts. Conversely, the case of reading could reinforce an
analysis of concert attendance which is anything but a temporally linear listening of musicians play-
ing instruments.
122 A. POMIÈS AND A. HENNION

Taste and new technologies

Anissa: What are the consequences of technological changes like Artificial Intelligence on cultural
practices? How do we research these sorts of changes?

Antoine: I will not elaborate so much on that question, I know little about Artificial Intelligence. I
can only extrapolate from the numerous technical revolutions related to recording in the case of
music. History tends to repeat itself. Innovation after innovation, new technical means aim to be
more transparent than the previous ones. In being more loyal, more durable, and easier to carry,
new technologies aim to preserve the integrity of music. Yet, they also become new ways to produce
music as soon as they are adopted. In so doing, these new technical means produce new approaches
to music, and even new genres, and novel ways of listening to music. As a consequence, the experi-
ence of listening to music itself changes. Sometimes, changes are particularly surprising and unex-
pected. But I am talking in generalities here. Empirical research that goes in depth in the experience
of Artificial Intelligence would be needed to say more about it, just like what I have done in the case
of music with Bach on the nineteenth century.

Advice and venues for further research

Anissa: What would you recommend to researchers willing to investigate taste and cultural
practices?

Antoine: The most direct and simple advice I have relates to the core notion of experience that I
introduced earlier. Just like the experience of amateurs, the experience of researchers consists in
going with the course of events. It means closely participating in the activities performed by the
actors of interest, spending time in places where they gather, and attending their events. My advice
would be trivial if it was purely methodological, like a tip to keep in mind while doing fieldwork, and
before taking a step back to theorize data and to produce a sociological knowledge.
My advice is completely different. Switching to a pragmatist approach is much more radical. A
pragmatist approach emphasizes that worlds are always in the making, and futures depend on the
way we engage here and now (and without any guarantee) in the versions we want to be realized.
That’s why the inappropriately named social “sciences” should make “an inversion of the thinkable”,
to paraphrase de Certeau. We do not need a theory that claims to explain the course of innumerable
and unexpected events. Nor we need to take a step back to identify what other people cannot see. We
definitely do not need any attempt to have the final word as researchers. All these approaches of social
inquiry call themselves science when they evoke something like a religious approach of the end of time.
On the contrary, our work can be meaningful only if it aims at getting closer to experiences. Just
like us, actors themselves explore “what is going on”, with different means though. They swim in
unknown waters, they do not know what can happen. We are not in a better and more comfortable
situation than them. What I am saying should not sound like a renunciation, nor like a humblebrag-
ging statement. It is not pure demagogy neither. We simply need to admit that we are part of the
world we investigate. We contribute to make it happen to a certain extent. In both music and
research, details, openness, and the sudden appearance of the unexpected matter more than heavy
institutional machines that claim to frame ongoing experiences. These experiences happen in a
world which is “still in process of making”, as William James once said.
Anissa: Antoine, thank you for taking time to answer my questions. Your answers help strengthen
the bridge between French sociology and the international field of consumer research.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 123

Notes on contributors
Anissa Pomiès is a consumer researcher. She analyzes taste practices and market systems.
Antoine Hennion is a Professor of Sociology. He works on taste and cultural practices.

ORCID
Antoine Hennion http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9602-3746

Suggested references
Gomart, Emilie, and Antoine Hennion. 1999. “A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users.” The
Sociological Review 47 (1): 220–247.
Hennion, Antoine. 1989. “An Intermediary Between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music.”
Science, Technology and Human Values 14 (4): 400–424.
Hennion, Antoine. 1997. “Baroque and Rock: Music, Mediators and Musical Taste.” Poetics 24 (6): 415–435.
Hennion, Antoine. 2001. “Music Lovers. Taste as Performance.” Theory, Culture, Society 18 (5): 1–22.
Hennion, Antoine. 2004. “Pragmatics of Taste.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, edited by
Mark Jacobs and Nancy Hanrahan, 131–144. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hennion, Antoine. 2007. “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 1 (1): 97–
114.
Hennion, Antoine. 2010. “The Price of the People. Sociology, Performance, Reflexivity.” In Cultural Analysis and
Bourdieu’s Legacy, edited by Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde, 117–127. London: Routledge/CRESC.
Hennion, Antoine. 2014. “Playing, Performing, Listening: Making Music or Making Music Act?” In Popular Music
Matters: Essay in Honour of Simon Frith, edited by Lee Marshalland Dave Laing, 165–180. Farnham: Ashgate.
Hennion, Antoine. 2015. “Paying Attention: What Is Tasting Wine About?” In Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites
of Dissonance, edited by Ariane Berthoin Antal, Michael Hutter and David Stark, 37–56. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hennion, Antoine. 2015. The Passion for Music. A Sociology of Mediation. London: Routledge.
Hennion, Antoine. 2017. “Attachments, You Say … ? How a Concept Collectively Emerges in One Research Group.”
Journal of Cultural Economy 10 (1): 112–121.
Hennion, Antoine. 2017. “From Valuation to Instauration: On the Double Pluralism of Values.” Valuation Studies 5
(1): 69–81.
Hennion, Antoine, Cécile Méadel, and Geoffrey Geoffrey Bowker. 1989. “The Artisans of Desire: The Mediation of
Advertising Between Product and Consumer.” Sociological Theory 7 (2): 191–209.
Teil, Geneviève, and Antoine Hennion. 2004. “Discovering Quality or Performing Taste? A Sociology of the Amateur.”
In Qualities of Food, edited by Mark Harvey, Alan Warde, and Andrew McMeekin, 19–37. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.