Beyond Development and Morality 147Similarly, in our workplaces, there is an increasing emphasis on social
networking, teamwork, as well as harmonious and non-contentious
collaborations with co-workers and administrators that draw on our social
capacities and place them in service to make a profit. Our work lives are no
longer centered in one location or workplace but networked in temporary
configurations of impermanent or contingent labor. There is an emphasis
on entrepreneurship, which appropriates our creativity and intellectual
capacities as bargaining chips within a precarious system of casino
capitalism, where we might win one day but lose the next, and in which the
house always wins.
With this shift in the mode of production, there are simultaneous shifts
in the way that developmental psychology begins to orient itself within the
realms of cyber-capitalism. While some of these shifts may appear to
signal a move away from the dominant binary Cartesian view of human
growth, we would well be advised to remember that any advances in the
system of capitalist production are the result of revolutions that have failed
and been appropriated. It is also essential to consider the possibility, as
Negri (2012) would have it, that it is a failed revolution that can have the
greatest degree of future revolutionary possibility because it has so much
unexpended capacity. In the realm of cyber-capitalism and 21st-century
developmental psychology, there are several domains of revolutionary
impetus that are at stake. Each of these has a history of struggle as well as
a contemporary history of continued alternative force that I will consider in
a moment.
As I have noted above, the ability of capitalism to use spaces of
containment such as the factory, the home, the clinic, and the school as
spaces of discipline and training was imbricated in the theories of
developmental psychology. The dissemination of industrial concepts that
produce children as social products and the clinic, the school, and the home
as mutually reinforcing regimes that shaped young people according to
rather specific templates of behavior and subjectivity was a hallmark of
industrial capitalist sociality. The center of these activities was the home,
and the primary technician who administered and coordinated social
reproduction was designated to be the mother (Donzelot 1979; Federici,