This change of ontology or philosophy has recursive implications for our work as psychologists observing the discourse of anorexics sharing their suffering. In brief, there is no ‘suffering’ without this narrative mediation, among many other elements.

Conclusions

The first step is to reconsider the function of the mediators, or relational regulators, we live by, of which language is not but one among many. Secondly, we should start to take into consideration that language is a relational mediator. In this line of thought neither Piaget nor Vygotsky were strictly right in their depictions (see Cole and Wertsch, 1996), for if our argument makes sense:

Language also […] becomes a mediating artefact like the ruler, the chart […] even when we talk to ourselves, memorize a routine, or invent shortcuts and rules of thumb to overcome a difficulty of calculating (Latour, 1996b: 58).

It is tempting to think that the words and the world are coordinated by language in order to produce the meanings. It is more accurate to say that the meanings, the world, and the words are put into coordination with one another via the mediating structure of language. (Hutchins, 1995: 299-300).

In Actor-Network Theory wording language or cognition cannot be the property of an individual, nor of a society, but of a collective of humans and non-humans working together. In this vein, to close we would like to quote a brief piece of Latour’s article On technical mediation (1998b):

 

 

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