ABSTRACT
However, for this theory of passion to contribute further to a theory of policy, one question that would need further clarification is what precisely is the relationship between the way in which cultural institutions help constitute their object and this passionate voluntarism, which apparently allows us to freely create our own cultural universes; as if, as Richard Middleton has put it in a brief discussion of Hennion, “actors can simply decide how to use music, outside the constraints and pressures of those frameworks that form both it and them” (Middleton 2003, p. 3)? Negus (1996, pp. 60-62) makes a related point about Hennion’s early contention that, rather than the music industry imposing musical tastes on its passive audiences, there is an interactive relationship between the two, in which industry personnel empathetically intuit the tastes of the public, “feeling its pulse” and thus becoming, in Hennion’s words, “politicians in a sort of imaginary democracy instituted by songs” (quoted in Le Guern 2003, p. 22). This foregrounding of the empathetic and intuitive over the organizational and structural, Negus believes, may rely too easily and uncritically on interviewees’ unreflexive accounts – an objection that might be raised regarding Hennion’s methodology as a whole, though it must be said that Negus’s critique, like other AngloAmerican assessments of Hennion’s work, is based on a single translated extract from Les Professionnels du disque written some twenty-five years ago, which Hennion now repudiates.
