The Voice and the Eye: On the Relationship between Actors and Analysts

For a long time we have been accustomed to define social sciences as a study of society and to conceive society as a functional system organized around values and norms, and creating order and civilization. This classical view should be abandoned and the very concept of society dropped. In situations which appear as temporary and unstable results of various processes of power relations, conflicts, and negotiations, we should study how society is produced more than the way it is consumed, the way it changes more than how it functions. That cannot be achieved with our usual methods to study answers to situations. We should give a high priority to methods through which social movements and all forms of collective behavior create a system of social control of given cultural orientations. The method I call sociological intervention, whose principles have been presented in La voix et le regard and which has already been applied to the student movements (1978) and to the antinuclear movement (1979), is an attempt to design a new tool for the study of a new image of social reality.