ABSTRACT

The transcribed interview allowed the writer to create a discourse that suspended, even did away with, the presence of a real subject in the world. It made social experience and human character irrelevant to the topic at hand. A performative social science discourse uses the reflexive, active interview as a vehicle for producing moments of performance theatre, a theatre that is sensitive to the moral and ethical issues of our time. In the surveillance society, journalists, social scientists, psychiatrists, physicians, social workers and the police use interviews to gather information about individuals. Throughout the twentieth century and well through the second decade of this new century, the transcribed interview remains the basic information-gathering tool and one of the major writing forms used by scholars in the social sciences. The interview elicits interpretations of the world, for it is itself an object of interpretation. But the interview is not an interpretation of the world per se.