I’m wading through Bruno Latour and finishing my dissertation this month, feeling ever more terrified and hopeless. There is so much to do, and too little time in which to give the material the quality of treatment it deserves. But in the middle of my despair, Latour presented me with an encouraging rant part-way through Reassembling the social. Paragraph breaks have been added, because Latour’s overflowing, impassioned verbiage does not translate well into blog format.

What is an account? It is typically a text, a small ream of paper a few millimetres 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 half a dozen people (if you are lucky, ever your Ph.D advisor would have read parts of it!) and when I say ‘read’, it does not mean ‘understood’, ‘put to use’, ‘acknowledged’, but rather ‘perused’, ‘glanced at’, alluded to', ‘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 media 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.

Action had already started; it will continue when we will no longer be around. What we are doing in the field - conducting interviews, passing out questionnaires, taking notes and pictures, shooting films, leafing through the documentation, clumsily loafing around - is unclear to the people with whom we have shared no more than a fleeting moment. What the clients (research centres, state agencies, company boards, NGOs) who have sent us there expect from us remains cloaked in mystery, so circuitous was the road that led to the choice of this investigator, this topic, this method, this site.

Even when we are in the midst of things with our eyes and ears on the lookout, we miss most of what has happened. We are told the day after that crucial events have taken place, just next door, just a minute before, just when we had left exhausted with our tape recorder mute because of some battery failure. Even if we work diligently, things don’t get better because, after a few months, we are sunk in a flood of data, reports, transcripts, tables, statistics, and articles.

How does one make sense of this mess as it piles up on our desks and fills countless disks with data? Sadly, it often remains to be written and is usually delayed. It rots there as advisors, sponsors, and clients are shouting at you and lovers, spouses, and kids are angry at you while you rummage about in this dark sludge of data to bring light to the world.

And when you begin to write in earnest, finally pleased with yourself, you have to sacrifice vast amounts of data that cannot fit in the small number of pages allotted to you.

How frustrating this whole business of studying is.

Reassembling the social, p. 123.