150 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
common language for all these places exists, it is analogical” (p. 4). As we
move into the society of control, on the other hand,
the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming
a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which
doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings,
but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will
continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose
mesh will transmute from point to point. (p. 4)The implications of this shift in the processes of subjectification are
profound for developmental psychology. Regrettably, for mainstream
psychology, the turn towards neurological reductionist paradigms has
muted, if not entirely obscured, psychological analyses of social trends
under 21st-century capitalism. The exception has been in the work of
feminist psychologists, such as Erica Burman, and the broader field of
contemporary feminist theory. Part of the reason for this is a divergence
between the increasingly science-driven paradigms of current
psychological theory and the ossification of some of psychology’s more
radical edges such as phenomenology, radical humanism, and
existentialism. Of course, there have been movements in psychology to
incorporate the theoretical implications of postmodernism, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks, work on
decolonization, and even the neo-Spinozist ideas of Deleuze and Guattari.
However, like the works of Gilligan and Burman in their feminist critiques
of developmental psychology, these efforts remain marginal to the field.
That said, there is little doubt that the lived experience of children’s
development has shifted and is quite likely to shift further as we enter the
world of advanced capitalist appropriation. As psychologists, we might
well take the warning at the beginning of the chapter seriously, when
Burman warns us that developmental psychology will never offer us the
tools to create/discover “minds and bodies capable of revolutionary social
change and the transformation of structures and relations of oppression”
(Burman, 1994/2016 p. 286).