LaTour and Readability

Maggie writes, "I must say my own understanding appears to come and go in various parts of the book."

I feel your pain, Maggie. On the one hand, I find LaTour's writing pretty reader friendly, given that he's A) a theory guy, and B) he's French! Usually, such a pairing makes for difficult reading, but LaTour often sounds down to earth ("If this looks like splitting hairs, well it is, but this is because the tiny difference in direction taken by the two sociologies is no larger than a hair's width" (39)), and his sometimes colloquial style is definitely reassuring--no real struggling to make sense out of long, twisting, convoluted sentences as in Derrida or Foucault.

Which reminds me. There's this Lydia Davis short story, "Foucualt and Pencil," where Davis, who is also a translator of French (she has a new translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time which is supposed to be pretty good), pokes fun at the experience of reading Foucault:

"Short sentences easier to understand than long ones. Certain long ones understandable part by part, but so long, forgot beginning before reaching end. Went back to beginning, understood beginning, read on, and again forgot beginning before reaching end. Read on without going back and without understanding, without remembering, and without learning, pencil idle in hand. Came to sentence that was clear, made pencil mark in margin. Mark indicated understanding, indicated forward progress in book."

I thought some might enjoy the levity there! Plus, we're supposed to be looking for webs of meaning, and this whole discussion of LaTour and the readability of theory in general traced an association, in my mind, to the Davis story. Okay, back to the program...

On the other hand, I do find the LaTour rough going in that, as with most theory, I still find that I understand things at the surface level much more than at the detail level. Yes, LaTour's surface is friendlier and easier to read. There's little of the, as Davis pokes fun at, having to consistently go "back to beginning," but I still have that sort of "Okay, I understand the gist here, but could I really put this into practice?" feeling. I'm still making my way through Part I, however, and I assume that the book takes the reader through some more specific examples or case studies before it ends.

Overall, though, I find the LaTour reading much less ominous that I had feared (or that I had felt after reading his introduction weeks back).