From his study on Vienna to major AIDS surveys, Michael Pollak has marked the social sciences of the 1980s and 1990s from his imprint. The collective work that Liora Israel and Danièle Voldman now dedicates to him of the renewed interest that the work of the sociologist arouses.
That a researcher leaves when he disappears ? Memories, an office to his colleagues, a bibliography, a few books, several cubic meters of blackened paper, dozens of magnetic cassettes … and for only a few posterity.
Few this posterity is immediately obvious. Social researchers often go through a purgatory from which many never come out. And then there are those to whom, fifteen after their death, unanimous debt is recognized. Without them the discipline would not have been the same, without them possible would not have opened, without them young researchers would not have entered the profession. Sociologist Michael Pollak, died of AIDS at 44, is one of them. Its archives are kept in no less than three places (the Institute of History of the Present Time, the Mémoires Institute of Contemporary Edit and the Austrian Cultural Center of Paris), and, following An injured identitytribute book published immediately after her disappearance in 1993 with his editor Anne-Marie Métailié, a second collective work devoted to her work and comprising unpublished has just been published. For a long time, the work of this international researcher was crushed by his tragic end: the researcher investigating the disease which he was going to succumb. Now, this was a huge misinterpretation as explained with elegance and clarity Luc Boltanski in a text that closes the collective volume: Pollak was looking for a new practice of the function of the intellectual, “ Between the limited expert and the muddy intellectual ».
Son of May 68, he was a part, with Luc Boltanski, Nathalie Heinich and a few others, of the generation who had surrounded the work of Pierre Bourdieu before distancing himself to develop his own furrow within the GSPM (Group of political and moral sociology). As Liora Israel and Danièle Voldman write, he placed himself in the confluence “ of a critical sociology and a then emerging sociology of criticism, enriched with Germanic and North American contributions ».
A cosmopolitan sociologist
Pollak has indeed embodied for a few years an unprecedented and precious figure, that of a cosmopolitan, even hybrid sociologist, like the city of Vienna in 1900 to which he had devoted a beautiful work in the Archives collection in 1984. Untimely, his thinking was constantly nourished by the confrontation of different and sometimes opposite sociological cultures. This freedom, so rare, as many authors of the collective underline, thus led him to cross our modern societies from angles and according to very diverse questions: from Vienna to witnesses of the Shoah, from AIDS to May 68. Undoubtedly the strength of this work is to have made research activity its own field of investigation, from its thesis which carried, from the case of sociology and economic science, on “ The implications of scientific policy on the evolution of the scientific field ». Complex posture, like its institutional inscription, always offbeat, as if Pollak had made his word from Foucault, “ have no more face to appear where you are not expected “: From theOECD At Cnrsfrom the Wissenschaftskolleg from Berlin to theEhessfrom the Georges Pompidou center to Cornell University. Speaking, twenty years apart, is also the ability of this European researcher to have initiated collective work (some of which were continued after his death), starting with the practice of research with four hands that punctuates his entire bibliography, illustration of the researcher’s humility at the same time as a quest for efficiency. Because Pollak devoured the grounds with a delightful appetite which, in the context of the current crisis, encourages us.
How to account for this Pollak trajectory, this original research course ? Its proximity to a whole generation of researchers who are today the main animators of the sociological discipline is both a sign and presented a great risk: as a tribute to produce – as is often the case – an infinite sequence of articles where everyone rents what they were and what has become. Here, nothing like this because Liora Israel and Danièle Voldman resolutely wanted to place Michael Pollak on the side of our news by wondering what presence today have her work. It is therefore a portrait to the present that is offered to us, composed by a series of twelve articles of historians, statisticians and sociologists, supplemented by a round table on the concept of expert. Among the authors, Pollak himself, whose volume coordinators had the excellent idea of republishing or translating two fascinating articles: a first, co-written with the American sociologist of Sciences Dorothy Nelkin and published in 1979, on the participation of the public in the taking of technological decisions, whose contribution of Pierre Lascoumes shows the important theoretical contribution with the taking into account of what we call the “ Social Risk Construction ». The second text, co -signed with the statistician Alain Desrosières, came from a workshop held in January 1987 in Berlin which focused on the way scientists proceed when they make a product. It was a question of showing that the study of the techniques of registration, formalization and description of the social sciences could not be separated “ Neither alliances and policies that underlie them from that of social forms, nor even instruments of economic and social management, which they shape in return ».
Identity research
Reading Pollak’s intellectual portrait which is articulated with these publications, we are struck by the fact that many of the hypotheses he developed in a pioneer are almost almost passed on the side of the shared domain: everything happens as if the fifteen years separating us from his disappearance had brought in the themes of his work, and above all their approach, in the collective field. In fact, it is striking to note, with a generation of researchers who did not know it (Florence Tamagne, Liora Israel or Cyril Lemieux), how her work has carried around the notion of identity, whether it is the approach of testimony or innovative and sometimes fragile analyzes on the “ community Homosexual. It is precisely on this last point that two of the colleagues of Pollak come from in a beautiful article which restores the history of the implementation and the realization of a particular scientific project, namely the creation of a vast observatory in homosexual environment from 1985. Janine Pierret and Marie-Ange Schiltz show through this example, which will take due to the disappearance of the sociologist a tragic tour, the formidable maturity of this thought, In the network a series of very varied investigative modes in order to produce unprecedented knowledge, as well as theoretical flexibility refusing unique affiliation. The several level survey is deployed with in particular the famous gay press investigation (with the publication of a questionnaire in the newspaper Gay), the sociologist becoming at the same time a member ofAidthe first AIDS combat association. And Pierret and Schiltz to write that Pollak invented a position of “ mediator Strong fertile, both for scientific production, which has been enriched with his personal experience, and for associations.
It is to this question of the function of the researcher that Nathalie Heinich devotes her participation in the round table by emphasizing the imposing place of research contractualized in the bibliography of Michael Pollak. Heinich recalls that the sociologist was also a formidable contract manager within the associationADDRESS (Association for the development of sociological, statistical and economic research and studies) which he presided over in 1984. Pollak held together, without ever blurring borders, nor feeding any reluctance for one of them according to Heinich, the functions of expert, researcher and intellectual. It is there, in the eyes of the sociologist, that Pollak remains a model to follow at a time when the quarrels between the supporters of contract research and those who advocate total independence of researchers are reactivated by the creation of the National Research Agency (ANR).