FIGURE 2. Formation and recursivity of Work-Nets.

Going back to our example: if we observed the case of an ‘Internet-community-of-people-suffering-from-anorexia’ to use this new ontology as a basis would mean to study the connections between actants (discourses of and about anorexia as the one showed, applied technologies of the self, doctors and psychologists, computers, wires, definitions of ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’, ‘vomit’ and ‘fashion’, the World Wide Web…) that are needed to extend multiple networks and to eventually stabilise a new actor-network called “anorexia” and how they are related.

The arranged discourse showed above is a long-running artefact, whose nature is only apparently “textual” and that allows the formation and disciplining of some people and the categories they use to ‘lead with pain and suffering’ and to share it. In sum, the previous genealogy of the technologies of the self could be inserted in a broader description that focuses on two mediated process, crucial to the understanding of the most widely spread theory of action in our Western thought (Latour, 1993):

 

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