Musique, émotion et individualisation

A dominant strand in the sociology of music understands music to be a positive resource in active selfmaking. While accepting that music has many positive dimensions in modern societies, I question the view of the self underlying this understanding, and argue for the importance of a critical and historical approach to music and subjectivity which recognises the significance of people’s emotional experience. I then offer a more critical way of thinking about the role of music in modern societies using Axel Honneth’s notion of ‘organized self-realization’ as a defining feature of the process of individualization in contemporary societies. Using interviews with people about their musical practices, tastes and values, I explore how this idea might suggest more ambivalent ways in which musical consumption figures in everyday life. Because music is held to have particular links both to the realms of subjectivity and emotion, and also to pleasurable sociality, it may represent a particularly powerful site where the obligation to be a sensitive and pleasure-feeling sociable individual in modern society is tested out.