Theoretical Discourse, Subjectivity and Critical Psychology

Abstract

Where do we start, even when we start again? Often when we are faced with an insurmountable problem or we want to get somewhere when the route looks too rough, we think that it would be much easier if we could start from anywhere but here. I have that kind of thought when I’m working on issues of ideology and power in psychology. The discipline of psychology just does not seem able to tolerate a consideration of those kinds of issues. Or, when it looks like it is taking them seriously the discipline then engages in a thorough assimilative process that the Situationists used to call ‘recuperation’ (Debord, 1977). The Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s wanted to disrupt the machinery of capitalist consumer culture that they saw operating as a ‘society of the spectacle’, and so they were particularly sensitive to the recuperation of radical ideas into the spectacle, to the way that threats to power are neutralized and absorbed into the existing rules of the game.