ABSTRACT
Yet, despite all this, Hennion is something of a rising star in cultural theory. His work is regularly cited outside France, in the fields of sociology, musicology and cultural studies. Tia DeNora (2000), for example, in her ground-breaking study Music in Everyday Life, cites him as one of the theorists arguing for the interactive nature of what she calls the “music-society nexus”. Simon Frith (1996), Richard Middleton (2003) and Keith Negus (1996) also allude to him in the context of popular music. Like Bourdieu, his analysis has an empirical starting point but reaches a level of interpretative generality that occasionally comes close to philosophy, ranging from the phenomenological description of the ways in which music is carried out, to the dense argumentation, sinuous syntax and customized lexis familiar in French cultural theory, though always with a determination not to lose sight of the “pragmatics” of cultural practice. At times, his professional and personal styles are also tinged with humour, particularly face to face, suggesting a readiness, unusual in French academic circles, not to take himself too seriously.
