146 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
Piagetian psychologists enamored of Fordist and Taylorist models of
assembly production so essential to the expansion and deployment of the
industrial capitalist project (Burman, 1994/2016; Wasiak, 2011). These
Foucauldian diagrams of industrial production continue to have resonance
as definitional frameworks for families, physicians, teachers, and, of
course, psychologists (among other ‘mental health’ care providers) as they
interact with and shape the lives of children. It is important note, that these
industrial diagrams from a fading mode of capitalist production are still the
most predominant understandings of human development as we enter the
21 st century.
In this regard, as we move into the 21st century, industrial social
diagrams are ever so gradually giving way to more flexible models of
developmental trajectories more in keeping with the current capitalist
mode of production. Hardt and Negri (2001) argue, that as we enter the
21st century, the predominant mode of production shifts from the
disciplinary regimes of industrial capitalism. Under industrial capitalism,
psychology acted as an “immaterial space of confinement; confining the
developing child to a hierarchical and quantifiable notion of teleological
time and thus a hierarchical and quantifiable notion of value. Anything or
anyone not fitting this confine is rejected as abnormal” (Wasiak, 2011 p.
122).
In our contemporary period, things begin to shift as capitalist relations
reach a point of full social saturation at a global level. At the same time,
capitalism engages global virtual platforms that allow for modes of cyber-
production that shifts the historical tendency away from industrial
production and towards what Negri (2012) calls “immaterial labor.”
Immaterial labor refers to new modes of cyber production in which the
kinds of physical labor common in agricultural and industrial modes of
capitalism shifts into an appropriation of our social and intellectual
capacities, such as the historical tendency to open modes of purely virtual
social activity in a rapidly proliferating set of media platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. These new modes of labor have
us deploying our capacities for sociality to the ends of multibillion-dollar
global corporate marketing networks.