254 Timothy J. Beck and Jacob W. Glazier
suggest that Western psychological services reinforce colonial practices
because of a series of conceptual errors or a lack of material resources;
although these have likely served some role. Drawing on what is discussed
above, it is important to distinguish here between colonialism, or the
material annexation and extraction of resources beyond the empire, and
coloniality. The latter refers to a certain style of thinking, connected to
modernist philosophical frameworks that privilege the individual person
over cultural groups. This is precisely where transmodern frameworks that
take seriously the healing potential of social ritual and spiritual practices
can provide an alternative to abnormal psychology as it is traditionally
understood.
At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that under the current
neoliberal conditions of global capitalism—where the economic value of
data and information networks rivals that of material goods or services—
fruitful overlaps across marketing, data analytics, and diagnostic
assessment render psychological concepts and practices most profitable for
professionals when they operate beyond the control of a handful of
institutions. This is especially relevant today since, as Gilles Deleuze
(1992) reminds us, we are living under societal conditions that are modeled
on control, where social power takes the form of continuous modulations
of behavior through the collection of data, rather than discipline, where
physical punishment is the primary form of behavioral conditioning. Here,
in this “capitalism of a higher-order production” (p. 6), colonialist thinking
and transmodern practices confront one another in highly paradoxical
ways, often using the same decentralized (i.e., networked) technologies.
The decentralization of mental health technologies, in particular, has
produced a double-movement of fulfilling the teleology of globalization
through the dispersion of psychiatric power, for instance, as well as the
expansion of psychology into more communally oriented spheres. The
latter has engendered certain groups and social networks to form with a
goal of taking the sting out of psychological pathology, so to speak. To
account for the sociopolitical and therapeutic values of such a constellation
of movements, and the intersectional subjectivities they produce, we have
argued that an epistemic change in thinking is required, moving beyond the