Bernard Mottez and the Sociology of the Deaf Andrea Benvenuto A Sociologists 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 Mottezs 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 lÉpée. (Dont let this thought disturb you. I am not comparing the two menfor nowexcept with respect to how often their names appear.) The more I read Mottezs 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 wordsa quality frequently missing from scientific texts that are too often notable for the dryness with which they treat their subjects. Mottezs writingsand even more his presentations at conferencestestify to his deep engagement as a sociologist with the subjects of his [End Page 4] work, deaf people. Sociological inquiry is generally based on anonymous and standardized questions, and this scientific criterion is a necessary conditionat least as far as some people are concernedfor 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 ones 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 masters 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 Touraines 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 impressionfrom his writingsthat Mottez is an explorer of the fringes, someone who looks beyond where people normally [End Page 5] 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...