Beyond Development and Morality 151With new modes of oppression and appropriation moving with
astonishing speed across the global landscape of our lives, there is an
urgency to re-think psychology in relation to development outside the
frameworks of developmental psychology. This rethinking of
developmental psychology would imply a perspectival necessity to see
both psychology and development differently before placing them in
proximity to each other. Psychology itself is deeply compromised as we
have noted above and may be unsalvageable. Similarly, development is
founded in a dubious legacy of colonialism and capitalist modes of
appropriation. The question is, can we find a new foundation for either or
both of them? Is there what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) might call a
minor lineage of psychological development?
One response to this might be to explore psychology outside of its
history as a lens that explains human behavior and cognition through
frameworks such as Skinner’s behaviorism, Piaget’s notions of
competition, evolutionary psychology’s concepts of reproductive necessity,
neurological psychology’s investment in motivation, or Kohlberg’s ideas
about moral development. Is it possible to re-found psychology as a non-
binary, non-hierarchical, non-mechanistic, non-reductionist, and non-
essentialist mode of inquiry into the psyche?
Given our depiction of children’s trajectories across the face of virtual
capital’s society of control, these 19th and 20th century paradigms have
limited utility. And yet, it is also the case that much of what postmodern
thought has offered as an alternative (i.e., subjective fluidity, freedom from
the rigid constraints of social modes of containment, the opening of hybrid
and multiplicitous forms of identity, and a release from dominant
constructions of nominalized truth regimes) has been appropriated by 21st
century neo-liberal capital and turned to its own ends. The question is,
within a system that appears to have tremendous flexibility to modulate its
regimes of appropriation and control, what constitutes a genuinely
transformative/revolutionary approach.
The key may lay in the abstract nature of capitalism itself. The source
of its infinite mutability resides in its existence as a binary code. The
capacity of capital to parasitically appropriate the creative capacities of