Bernard Mottez and the Sociology of the Deaf

A Sociologist’s Résumé

When I first arrived in France and began to attend conferences and read about deaf people and their history in that country, I came across the name Bernard Mottez. On certain subjects, such as the difference between a handicap and a disability, the origin of the Deaf movement, and even the acknowledgement that deaf people exist, Bernard Mottez’s name was always in the forefront. Again, when I did research on the pioneers who contributed to the “awakening of the deaf” during the 1970s in France, the same was true.

Perhaps, I told myself, we are in the presence of a twentieth- century Abbé de l’Épée. (Don’t let this thought disturb you. I am not comparing the two men—for now—except with respect to how often their names appear.)

The more I read Mottez’s articles, the more I was taken with his unique way of discussing issues and presenting his ideas. I was completely dazzled by the manner in which he “brings to life” his written words—a quality frequently missing from scientific texts that are too often notable for the dryness with which they treat their subjects. Mottez’s writings—and even more his presentations at conferences—testify to his deep engagement as a sociologist with the subjects of his work, deaf people. Sociological inquiry is generally based on anonymous and standardized questions, and this scientific criterion is a necessary condition—at least as far as some people are concerned—for any research to qualify as “scientific.” This model of the neutral researcher is quite remote from the sketch of the sociologist that I want to present here. For Mottez, learning something about the ways in which people see, exist, appear, and act is possible only when one engages and risks one’s own persona, which is to say when researchers put at risk their own ways of seeing, being, existing, appearing, and acting rather than telling the research subjects what it is the researcher wants them to say.

Bernard Mottez received an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1953, a master’s degree in philosophy in 1954, and, in 1963, a doctorate in sociology. In the meantime, he had joined (in 1958) the Laboratory for the Sociology of Labor founded in the same year and directed by Alain Touraine. There he dedicated himself to studying the evolution of wage systems. Researchers at that time were attempting to understand the relationship between salary structures and workers’ skills, as if these two subjects were separable. Following Touraine’s theory that the system of skills is a social system because it is created by people, Mottez concentrated on the indissoluble relationship between wages and skills, thereby establishing the basis for his analysis, many years later, of the condition of deafness. For Mottez, according to this view, deafness is not a defect that attaches to a person who cannot hear; instead, deafness is a relationship. For deafness to be significant, at least two people need to be involved.

After a stay in Chile in 1966 and 1967, where he was an advisor to the minister of labor, Mottez returned to his position at the Center for the Study of Social Movements, the new name for the Laboratory for the Sociology of Labor. It was then the early 1970s, and our sociologist was becoming interested in movements that are not easily categorized. He was looking in places where no one else had looked, where no one could see that it was even possible for a problem to exist, and he was looking around the fringes, attracted by borders that are seductive simply because they have gone unnoticed. I have the impression—from his writings—that Mottez is an “explorer of the fringes,” someone who looks beyond where people normally stop. I have never read texts that are so full of footnotes that refer less often to the citations of other authors as to new fragments of thought, to bits of evidence, and even to bibliographies. One has the impression of texts that are in a permanent state of...