Loving Music: from a Sociology of Mediation to a Pragmatics of Taste

Abstract

This contribution provides an account of musical taste as a meaningful accomplishment and a situated activity, with its tricks and bricolages, instead of reducing it to a game of social difference and identity. Taste is a problematic modality of attachment to the world. In such a pragmatist conception it is analyzed as a reflexive activity, corporeal, framed, collective, equipped, depending on places, moments and devices, which simultaneously produces the competencies of a music lover and a repertoire of objects. To be explained, it needs the sociologist to concentrate on gestures, objects, bodies, media, devices and relations engaged. Taste is a performance. Playing, listening, recording, making others listen…, all those activities amount to more than the actualization of a taste «already there». They are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. Thus amateurs’ attachments and ways of doing things both engage and form subjectivities, and have a history, irreducible to that of the works. Understood in this way, as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered an arbitrary election to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps to understand the way we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously reflexively controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others..