Still reading Latour’s The Making of Law. If Latour has taught us in the past to describe, here his descriptions are in hyperdrive. In Reassembling the Social, he wrote, “If your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description.” The Making of Law describes everything about the French legal process. It is a massive description. Description, Latour told us previously, is difficult to do. “To describe, to be attentive to the concrete state of affairs, to find the uniquely adequate account of a given situation, I myself have always found this incredible demanding.”

I am looking for a way to describe so that I can at least begin drafting the next project.  In my notes, collections of materials, readings, I need to start describing. But this description, unlike Latour’s project, is not meant to focus only on the details. It has to focus on the affective dimensions of craft. It has to be emotional, personal, and about obsession. It is not about the reader (as in an argument or move to persuade) but it is about me (narrative of sorts).

In a recent Details essay on the artisanal, we read that technology is at the heart of a renewed interest in all things craft.

For all its Amish-like affectations, the artisanal movement is clearly driven by technology (see “Artisanal 2.0,” opposite). What would all those people with niche obsessions do without the organizing power of the Web? It brings a nation of local crafters and consumers together, and intimacy, however far-flung, is the glue of the artisanal community.

Technology is the pattern found amid descriptions of craft. In Abstracting Craft, McCullough made a similar observation. The editors of BeerAdvocate call the current state of the industry Beer 3.0. A tab on my browser is always open to Ratebeer.com. A little description, even this little bit of description, reveals a pattern. I, the reader, find a repeating moment, idea, item, concept that will motivate and guide my work.

But the kind of description Latour advocates and/or performs - as he notes early in the book - is not reader-centric. Latour knows that the average American reader will not understand the references nor find familiarity with the French legal system. For me, the average reader will not find familiarity with craft beer nor with my obsession. So what is the point of such writing?

Method.