Sunday, January 21, 2007

An Account

Latour, in ch. 5 of Reassembling, writes this of "slowciological" accounts:

What is an account? It is typically a text, a small ream of paper a few millimeters thick that is darkened by a laser beam. It may contain 10,000 words and be read by very few people, often only a dozen or a few hundred if we are really fortunate. A 50,000 word thesis might be read by a half a dozen people (if you are lucky, even your PhD advisor would have read parts of it!) and when I say 'read', it does not mean 'understood', 'put to use', 'quoted', 'shelved somewhere in a pile'. At best we add an account to all those which are simultaneously launched in the domain we have been studying. Of course, this study is never complete. We start in the middle of things, in medias res, pressed by our colleagues, pushed by fellowships, starved for money, strangled by deadlines. And most of the things we have been studying, we have ignored or misunderstood. (122)

Even if I don't choose this as the epigraph to the preface to the rough draft of my dissertation prospectus, I find it to be an encouraging and humorous characterization of the phase that lies ahead. And this is to say nothing of Reassembling seeming one of the more important (read smart, even riveting) books I've picked up in recent months. Well, right, I am being sort of pokey in crawling through it, the way an aspiring slowciologist of associations should.

Posted by Derek Mueller at January 21, 2007 10:55 PM to Academe