Discourse and Social Psychology,postmodernism,and capitalist collusion: An argument for more complex historiographies of psychology

Joining the dots with David Harvey

To make their case, Hayter and Hegarty revisit some of the main sources and interlocutors for DSP. They look again at Chomsky’s (1965) theory of language, at Austin’s (1962) work on speech acts and at Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology. They suggest that in each case our rejection of Chomsky and our particular take-up of Austin and ethnomethodology push a more postmodern line. They claim the originals are more rooted in some way in real conditions beyond language. From there, historical research turns into joining the dots—DSP is more postmodern and constructionist—David Harvey argues that postmodernism is the ideology of late capitalism—therefore DSP must be a poster child for late capitalism. DSP becomes a politically contingent text and Hayter and Hegarty’s task becomes one of revealing DSP’s hitherto hidden function and effects. DSP is found guilty of smuggling in models of flexible selves, constructionist theories of meaning, and emphases on variation in people’s discourse. Somehow these choices directly reflected and sustained new globalized forms of exploitation and oppression, growing inequality, and current crises of accumulation.

Hayter and Hegarty rely on a principal source—Harvey’s (1989) historical narrative in The Condition of Postmodernity to legitimate their account of late capitalism, its division into epochs, and to specify its core ideologies. Harvey’s critique of postmodernity is a classic for sure and we also read him avidly to find out the shape of the moment. But the history of capitalism is also contentious, difficult to decipher, and surely requires a more systematic review? Nearly 25 years have passed since the publication of Harvey’s classic text—a long time in studies of capitalism. Historians are increasingly focused on the detail of the upheavals in liberal democracies and welfare states from the 1950s to the 1990s and cautious about taking one regime of accumulation as paradigmatic of an epoch. Harvey (2014) himself in his most recent work writes thoughtfully about the challenges involved in developing a non-essentialist revolutionary humanism that would have at its heart the making and remaking of flexible characters and capacities.

A huge amount has been written on the transition which concerns Hayter and Hegarty, from Fordism to post-Fordism and to neoliberalism, much of it emphasizing the complexity, local, national, and international variation and uneven application but also the ways in which new kinds of essentialisms have provided rhetorical accompaniments. The ideologies that support recent transitions in capitalism are clearly heterogeneous. Particularly dominant are notions of the individual explicit in rational actor and public choice theory in politics and economics, and assumptions that people have hardwired, unique competitive advantages that need to be maximized along with the denigration of those that don’t maximize their own utility (e.g., by “choosing” to live on benefits instead). If one was so-minded to make simple causal links, there is an equally plausible case that the rationalism, nativism, and universalism found in Chomsky’s theory of language are more powerfully supportive of the ideologies of current economics.

We respect Hayter and Hegarty’s ambitions but it is disappointing that their own prescriptions for social psychology remain opaque. For Hayter and Hegarty, it seems, DSP did not construct the right foundations for critical and qualitative research in psychology and did not draw the right messages from intellectual forebears. We can ask the intriguing question: what might be better frameworks for critical analytic work in social psychology? Would a return to Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) give us a more politically progressive and useful theory of language as social action? Hayter and Hegarty choose not to engage, however, or to develop their own standpoint, but to genealogize, safely sniping from a seemingly standpoint-free position. As they state, “It is not our intention to suggest ‘improved’ alternative directions for psychology in this paper, or to spawn new methodologies from our exploration of the political contingency of Potter and Wetherell’s discourse analysis” (201X, MANUSCRIPT p. 27). Their analysis must stand or fall, therefore, entirely in terms of its success as genealogy.

Genealogical research in psychology

As is well–known, the general thrust of genealogical research is to explore the conditions of possibility for discursive regimes. More than that, there is a critical edge, showing that bodies of work which present themselves as obvious next steps, or as simply arising from reason, or from the evidence, are in fact historically and politically contingent, deriving from and shoring up specific knowledge/power formations. In the hands of Nietzsche, of course, genealogy also had the feel of pricking pretension, showing, for example, that claims to superior morality were thoroughly contingent. In ideological critique more broadly, the “unmasking” aim is even more emphasized, showing that all is not as the advocates of bodies of thought pretend. There are some nasty bedfellows hidden underneath, determining what is promulgated.

Hayter and Hegarty present their work on DSP as an extension of Nikolas Rose’s analyses of psy-techniques, subjectification, and psychology’s regimes of the person (e.g., Rose, 1996). But, if one thinks, however, of a mature genealogy such as Foucault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish or, indeed, about Rose’s brilliant work on the history of psychology then it is clear that a lot more is involved than stating that this idea is a bit like this one, and this one has been connected by a prominent commentator to late capitalism, so the first one must be too. Genealogy links together ideas and theories with practices, institutions, techniques, etc. It is all about the consequences and the effects. So for Rose, it is about exploring the therapies, the categorizations and their impacts, the taxonomies, forms of institutionalization, and the measurement and surveillance modes of modern psychology. But ironically, given their preferences for more realist perspectives, Hayter and Hegarty’s genealogy of DSP considers only the text itself. Where are the practices, the techniques, and full-blown technologies derived from DSP that aid late capitalism? How is DSP imported directly into workplaces, into institutions, into modes of production in the way that Taylorism modified the design of factories?

It surely also would be relevant to explore how our own work developed out of DSP. We have a record of work in critical psychology, for instance, on racism, on middle-class masculinities, and on child protection and counselling on helplines to mention just three subsequent topics. This research tried to unpick social privileges and organized patterns of asymmetry. What does it mean that critical work of this kind and a large amount of other critical psychological research on social justice issues took off from DSP? Is all this work mistakenly grounded in what Hayter and Hegarty frame as a corrupt theoretical perspective rooted in, and complicit with, exploitative economic modes?

Reflexivity

Hayter and Hegarty make a lot of the importance of reflexivity and how DSP develops a notion of reflexivity that is both different from Garfinkel’s notion, and Foucault’s, and not as original as it, purportedly, claims. Hayter and Hegarty are not the first to bring up worries about reflexivity, see for example, Hammersley (2003) and the response by Potter (2003). Much of this comes from researchers confusing very different ways of using that word. Setting aside the Foucaultian notion, and the common qualitative research notion of researchers understanding their context of work and attending to their prejudices, we focused on reflexivity in its ethnomethodological and sociology of scientific knowledge senses.

In ethnomethodology reflexivity emphasizes how talk is both about something (it describes, categorizes, or formulates) and is doing something (it explains, apologizes, complains). Thus when our New Zealand interviewees described the violent actions of police attacking anti-apartheid protesters they were formulating their actions as following rules or flowing from natural human fight responses. These formulations, in turn, were analysable for what they were doing, in these cases excusing and justifying. Reflexivity captures the dual focus that is central to work in discourse analysis and discursive psychology. It is central to our analysis of the way participants’ interview talk could be built to deliver actions. This is a rather different idea than Hayter and Hegarty’s notion that we lean on reflexivity to demonstrate our rationality.

In the sociology of scientific knowledge reflexivity is used to consider the epistemic implications that flow from the researcher using discourse and its tropes to consider the operation of discourse and its tropes (Ashmore, Myers, & Potter, 1994). Within sociology of scientific knowledge and some discourse work alternative literary forms were used to draw attention to such issues and the dilemmas they raise (most fully in Ashmore, 1989; another significant work produced in the same year as Harvey). We discussed that tradition of work, and its implication, without engaging in an active use of alternative literary forms to make our points. Both these senses are significant parts of the project that DSP founded. They should not be confused with each other, nor with the Foucaultian or qualitative methods alternatives.

Ideas in practice

In our book Mapping the Language of Racism (Wetherell & Potter, 1992), we argued that discourse analysts examining the power of talk and texts should focus on ideological practice, not on the propositional content of arguments and theories alone. In relation to racism, what is often most crucial socially and politically is not so much the content of ideas or arguments in themselves (such as notions of blood and inheritance) but how those ideas are used in practice and to what effects. We noted, for instance, that essentialist arguments for the rights of indigenous people in white settler societies could be a highly effective anti-racist form of politics, while white liberalism and “tolerance of diversity” often sustained colonial relations. We argued it would not be essentialism per se that would necessarily determine whether a piece of talk or theory could be described as ideological in its effects. Assessments of ideological force could only be made through considering the contexts of use, and what was done with the propositional content. These ideas were developed further by Billig et al. (1988) in their notion of ideological dilemmas; this similarly emphasizes the ways in which ideas, philosophical arguments, and academic theories are put to use.

We stand by that point. Applying it now in this case—academic arguments for constructionism, non-essentialism, fragmented selves, etc. (advocated in DSP and also by those Hayter and Hegarty cite approvingly such as Foucault, Rose, and Billig) are not automatically by their very nature aids to late capitalism or rooted in late capitalism. To suggest otherwise attributes way too much power to knowledge production processes in the academy (and, incidentally, assumes a kind of idealism). It all depends on the context of development, the forms of use, and on how these arguments travel, and these aspects are entirely missing from Hayter and Hegarty’s account.

In conclusion, we discussed some of the issues raised here with a historian of our acquaintance. He imagined the following fictitious scene as a clarifying reductio ad absurdum.

The year is 1986. The two of you are working in the Psychology department in a small Scottish university town by the seaside reading Chomsky and admiring the totality of his critique, his concrete grasp of the differences between representation and reality, and the political implications thereof. You are both preparing to write a foundational book about how the alienating experience of Fordist manufacturing techniques has left people unable to use language to accurately articulate their true inner thoughts when, suddenly, one of you decides to switch on the news. The headlines come on and there is Thatcher, speaking on TV. She has just announced the abolition of fixed commissioning charges for financial services transactions. Suddenly, as if in a trance, and acting as vectors for world historical forces far beyond your understanding or control, you both slowly put down your copy of Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), close it forever, and begin writing Discourse and Social Psychology (Potter & Wetherell, 1987).

We appreciate, of course, that Hayter and Hegarty (201X) are attempting to trace the conditions of possibility for DSP, not our personal political investments, or even our familiarity with the regulation of financial services. We accept, too, that genealogy is valid and important. There are links, albeit often difficult to trace and only evident in practice, between academic theories and power/knowledge regimes. There are problems, too, with the ideas and arguments in DSP, things we are critical of now, and would have done differently, not least the way in which discussions of discourse, power, and ideology got postponed until Mapping the Language of Racism in 1992 (Wetherell & Potter). Both of us have moved on analytically and theoretically as is easily shown by a consideration of our subsequent intellectual writings that map out different pathways of development. But, to claim that DSP provides the Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor, 1911) for this capitalist epoch! Really?