Help with LaTour

If anyone's having difficulty making it through the first hundred or so pages of LaTour, you might want to skip to the section On the Difficulty of Being an Ant, where LaTour imagines a conversation between himself and a PhD student trying to understand ANT. I found it much easier to understand than the preceding sections. ANT's ideas seem to be most clearly expressed in the form of debate or conversation. Also, this section makes apparent the problems of ANT – that it's not really a theory and everybody (namely, thesis advisors) want a theory.

I could certainly see the influence of LaTour's ideas about social science in the methods textbooks I read to prepare for my thesis. His ideas of letting the actors speak for themselves become particularly relevant in ethnographic writing studies, where a teacher-researcher finds it much easier to be relevant by arguing “what's wrong” with student writing rather than understanding the students on their own terms. I liked his emphasis on writing and his appreciation of complexity – I think that the effort not to reach a resolution has gained a lot of ground in the field too. I wondered how he might feel about the use of academic discourse as a whole, not just that of social scientists, and the merit of teaching students to enter discourse communities. As with the halfway point of the Berlin book, I am interested to see if he'll attempt examples of what he's advocating for.