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In the ruins of representation: Identity,
individuality, subjectication
Dimitris Papadopoulos*
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK
This paper explores a threefold shift in our understanding of identity formation and
self-relationality: from an essentialist understanding of identity, to discursive and
constructivist approaches, to, nally, the notion of embodied subjectication. The main
target of this paper is to historicize these ideas and to localize them in the current social
and political conditions of North-Atlantic societies. The core argument is that these
three steps in reformulating the concept of identity correspond to an emerging form
of subjectivity, afrmative subjectivity, which is bound to the proliferation of the
post-Fordist reorganization of the social and political realm. The three theoretical shifts
and their social situatedness will be illustrated through a rereading of some ideas from
Lev S. Vygotskys late theory, Michel Foucaults account of government and Jacques
Rancie`res political philosophy.
One is too few, but two are too many
Donna Haraway (1991b, p. 177)
Three accounts of identity
Identity usually has a double connotation: individual identity and identity politics. This
distinction seems to rely on a widespread division of labour in social sciences.
Psychology and behavioural sciences deal with individual processes of identity
formation, while sociology and cultural studies explore social and cultural
congurations of identity and their relevance for different communities and social
institutions relying on these identities.
The emergence of alternative theoretical accounts on identity has questioned this
division. Identity politics presuppose a certain psychological apparatus and,
concomitantly, processes of self-relationality and psychological identication require
the organization of the sociopolitical space into discernible groups who maintain a
feeling of belongingness and negotiate intensive relations to imagined cohesive
* Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Dimitris Papadopoulos, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan
Building, King Edward VII Ave, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK (e-mail: papadopoulosd@cardiff.ac.uk).
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British Journal of Social Psychology (2008), 47, 139165
q 2008 The British Psychological Society
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DOI:10.1348/014466607X187037
communities (Anderson, 1991; Hall & du Gay, 1996). The proliferation of these
alternative accounts of identity has challenged traditional essentialist understandings
which consider identity to be a quality or a sum of qualities fastened as an abstract
essence to the individual (e.g. Erikson, 1993; Marcia, 1993a; for a critical evaluation of
these positions s. Kroger, 1996; Yoder, 2000). Alternative positions, in particular
discursive and constructivist approaches, stress the social nature of identity as the
outcome of interaction and positioning in different sociocultural contexts (e.g. Edwards,
1992; Gergen, 1990, 1997; Keupp, 1997; Shotter, 1993a).
However, the turn from the essentialist to a constructivist understanding of identity,
has been widely problematized as insufcient for tackling the issue of the
individual/social dichotomy (Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984;
Parker, 1992; Teo, 2005). Critical psychology and critical social psychology challenge
constructivist approaches on the grounds that they repeat the fallacy which they try to
overcome, foundationalism. While traditional theory reduces identity to an individual
substance (e.g. Erikson, 1993), constructivist approaches reduce identity to discursive
positioning (e.g. Gergen, 1991). I will come to the differences between these two
positions in the next sections of this paper, but for the moment I want to highlight
one important similarity which is crucial for understanding the knowledge politics of
identity. In both positions, we are dealing with an unspoken foundation underlying
the process of identity formation. This is the notion of the self, the notion that there is a
particular individual entity which is silently presupposed when we use the concept
identity. As Charles Taylor (1989) suggests, the central core of the modern self arises
from the feeling of an inner life in the individual. The modern individualistic image
of the human being relies on this foundationalist person-centred understanding of
the self. Stenner (2004) shows how this image of the human being serves as one of
the foundations for the emergence of modern political rationality, and Fraser (1999)
describes how reproductive heteronormativity is organized and sustained by the very
idea of selfhood. This tight grip between political rationalities of government, sexuality
and the psychological subject consolidates the self as the inescapable starting-point
for every modern attempt to think the individual (Giddens, 1991).
Neither essentialist nor constructivist positions seriously question the idea of the
self; instead their main concern is to dene its origins. Are the origins of the self
discursive or innate, dialogical or personal, relational or atomistic? As Harre (1983) says,
a transcendental moment is implied when we speak about identity; a moment which
presupposes the unity of the self in time and space through a certain hierarchy of action
and consciousness. The self irrespective of its origins appears to be the bottom line
and guarantor of identity (cf. Bruner, 1990). There are reasons that the category of the
self remains unquestioned in both the positions. The reason is that in North-Atlantic
societies we cannot think of the individual without the self. We are unable to think of the
individual without something which maintains this very basic unity in space and time;
and this is the self. The very core of psychology as science is rooted in this
understanding of individuality (Danziger, 1997). But, for the purposes of this paper, that
is to interrogate the knowledge politics of identity, it is important to highlight that
the individualistic perspective on the self is not simply a theoretical construction but
an active constructive force of our social reality.
Hence, irrespective of the philosophical or psychological conceptualizations of the
self, it is sustained by an extensive sociopolitical apparatus which organizes our
everyday lives and experiences. It is so difcult, almost impossible, to imagine ourselves
outside of the talk about the self in North-Atlantic societies today. Governmentality
140 Dimitris Papadopoulos
studies that is the investigation of technologies of self conduct and the governance
of human behaviour (Burchell, 1996; Dean, 1999; Rose, 1989) show how this
individualistic understanding of the self organizes and sustains social relations around
the logic of an autonomous and entrepreneurial individual in contemporary liberal
societies. It would be farcical to think that by merely describing and explaining
ourselves differently we could alter the individualistic tenor of psychological thought
and research, let alone dispose of the fashions of our existence and self-understanding.
And this is why constructivist understandings of identity were criticized; they explore
different discursive congurations of the self, but cannot question its proliferation.
Therefore, not only essentialist positions but also constructivist positions rely on the
self which is inseparable for the formation of individuality in North-Atlantic societies.
On these grounds the critical psychological programme of research questions the
constructivist foundationalism of identity and envisages the insertion of a moment of
critical reexivity (Parker, 2005) into the processes through which identities are
produced. For example, Blackman and Walkerdine suggest (2001, p. 110):
What we are arguing then is that the image of the human subject at the heart of
psychological theorizing the autonomous subject is not simply one version of
ourselves that we can choose to take on or discard at will. Instead, we live and embody
this image, through the relations we take up to ourselves, in a complex way, one that
cannot be reduced simply to the function of an individuals talk and accomplished social
action. We are tied to this image of subjectivity through its immersion within and across
a range of social and cultural practices that continually address us as if we were persons
of a particular kind. [ : : : ] If we are to address the role of psychology in processes of
subject formation, we need to investigate, rst, how a desired psy image is embedded
across a range of social and discursive practices, and second, how this image is lived or
embodied by subjects in their own techniques of self-understanding and transformation.
This last move from constructivism to critical psychology enables a nal shift in our
understanding of identity: by dutifully following governmentality studies, in particular
the work of Nikolas Rose, critical psychology moves the focus from identity formation to
power-infused processes of embodied subjectication (Rose, 1989, 1996b). The focus
now turns to how each different individual performs her participation in asymmetrical
social relations by actively changing her lived ways of being.
Overview of the argument and structure of the paper
The main objective of this paper is to historicize the shifts in our understanding of
identity from the essentialist view of traditional approaches to a constructivist
understanding to, nally, critical psychological theories on subjectication and the
conditions of the production of the self. The paper examines the knowledge politics of
identity; that is, it investigates the social dimensions and implications of these three
conceptualizations of identity. I will treat these approaches to identity as situated
knowledges (Haraway, 1988) and explore the sociopolitical contexts in which these
approaches become operative. The main argument is that the movement through these
three steps in our conceptualization of identity corresponds to an emergent form of
subjectivity which is situated in the ongoing neoliberal reorganization of the social realm
since the 1970s. Paraphrasing one of the pioneering studies in the critical tradition
of investigating the knowledge politics of psychological research, Walkerdines (1984,
p. 189) work on Piaget, we can say that the radical intentions of these three theories on
identity and the rectitude of their object do not matter; we have to make a distinction
In the ruins of representation 141
between the radical intentions of these theories and the effects and workings of these
theories at a particular historical moment.
Hence, if we take seriously the claim that theories of identity are situated
knowledges and understand how psychology fabricates the social subjectivities which it
studies, then we have to explore how newer alternative theories on identity that is
constructivist and critical psychological positions are germane to the formation of new
forms of social and political subjectivity in our societies. I will summarize these various
forms of subjectivity under the concept of afrmative subjectivity. The characteristic
feature of this form of subjectivity is that it shores up current forms of domination by the
very fact that it is in the position to explore their conditions of production. In other
words, the very fact that we are able to reect on and even to question our own active
involvement in current structures of domination becomes the means through which
contemporary domination is operating; and this is the sense in which the subjectivity
which arises from these situated knowledges is afrmative. Afrmative denotes the fact
that this form of subjectivity underpins what it questions.
Thus, this paradoxical afrmative function of the alternative accounts on identity is a
performative one: by challenging prevalent modes of subjectication and by
investigating their situated and embodied realizations, these accounts create an action
which corresponds to an emerging formof social relation pertinent to the malignance of
neoliberal power (Papadopoulos, 2002). The reason for this is that alternative accounts
have been primarily formulated as elements of resistance to the dominance of
essentialism. However, after Foucault, we know that resistance strengthens what it tries
to oppose. Alternative accounts are good for encompassing certain facets of domination
and for initiating resistance, but cannot instigate real passages and cannot engage, in the
words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 531), with cutting edges of creation and
deterritorialization. The main rationale of this paper is to investigate this paradoxical
function of constructivist and critical accounts of identity. The paradox is that
the alternative accounts came into being as critiques of existing forms of domination,
and, in fact, they are still able to function in this way on many occasions. However, from
the perspective of the changing constitution of political and social power in North-
Atlantic societies, which I will describe in the last sections of this paper, alternative
accounts to identity seem to sustain what they try to defy. As Wallerstein (1998, p. 13)
says, the revolutions never worked the way their proponents hoped or the way their
opponents feared.
I will trace the emergence and solidication of afrmative subjectivity by examining
the conceptual shifts made in the movements between the three theoretical positions on
identity. The rst move, questioning an essentialist understanding of identity, will be
approached by discussing Lev Vygotskys psychology (Part III). The reason for choosing
Vygotsky is that his work has been widely deployed as a vehicle for overcoming
essentialist and individualistic positions in psychology since the 1970s (of course there
are also other theories which were used to achieve similar goals, but this is beyond the
scope of this paper). In this part of the paper, I will assert that the break with essentialism
is founded on the possibility of articulating the self: articulation refers to both enunciative
practices of the person and the subjective rearrangement of existing meanings of her
environment. I will then go on to show how a very specic reading of Vygotsky enabled
the constructivist understanding of identity. This particular reading excluded other
possible understandings of Vygotsky, those primarily developedinthe eldof the German
critical psychology and to a certain extent also in Soviet activity theory. In a second step
(Part IV), I will refer to some ideas of Foucault which will help to understand how the
constructivist account on identity formation constitutes a formof self-government in the
political realities since the 1970s. Critical psychology adds to these constructivist
understandings the possibility of questioning the very conditions of the production of
identity and by doing this arrives at the concept of embodied subjectication.
Simultaneously and paradoxically, it contributes to the installation of afrmative
subjectivity which will be discussed in Part V. In this part of the paper, I will explore how
afrmative subjectivity constitutes the psychopolitical apparatus of the neoliberal subject
in post-Fordist conditions. In the conclusion (Part VI), I will give a brief overview of the
possible ways to interrupt the fabrication of afrmative subjectivity.
L.S. Vygotsky and the move from the essentialist to the constructivist
conceptualization of identity
The essentialist understanding of identity tries to establish a systematic operational
system which ascribes specic attributes to each particular individual. The statistical
treatment of quantied human differences is a powerful tool for organizing and
managing wide social and institutional landscapes (Kvale, 1977). From a knowledge
politics perspective, understanding identity as an essence corresponds with the
emergence of a social technology managing and steering the passage of people from one
social institution to another: education, employment, family, etc. Consider, for example,
the idea of developmental tasks which has been so inuential in theories of life-span
development and identity formation (Havighurst, 1972). The main tenets of this theory
are almost a mirror image of the expectations administration holds of what the subject
needs to accomplish in the course of his/her lifelong development in order to facilitate
the smooth operation of social institutions. As argued by many, the relationship between
psychological theories, social policy and public administration is a closed circuit
(e.g. White, 1996).
All attempts to question essentialist theories of identity have started by insisting that
the domain in which subjects interpret their experiences and adjust their action is, in
effect, a network of meanings and practices which are particular to specic social
contexts (Bruner, 1990; Geertz, 1973; Gergen & Gergen, 2002; Shweder, 1991). The
starting-point for questioning essentialist notions of identity was to infuse an
ambivalence into the very core of identity formation of the particular subject.
Constructivist positions suggested that this core does not exist at all; it is made of the
various ways each subject interprets and makes sense of meanings and artefacts in her
context. If the essentialist understanding of identity assumes that identity formation
unfolds along a predened set of stages and meanings (e.g. Marcias identity statuses,
Marcia, 1993b; cf. the critique of Cote, 1996), its critics assert that there is an
indeterminate relationship between the self and the meanings or artefacts surrounding a
particular person (Bruner, 1995; Schraube, 1998). These critics widely assume that
meanings and artefacts are the devices or cultural tools used in creating relations to the
self and to others (Scarry, 1985). Here, it is worth emphasizing that these devices exist as
soon as they are installed in the manifold self-governing techniques and practices of
individuals (Bourdieu, 1990). Thus, from the viewpoint of psychological research on
identity, cultural meanings and artefacts do not have pre-eminence over subjects, they
are invented and realized by subjects (Marvakis & Papadopoulos, 2002).
However, simply classifying and recording the meanings prevalent in a specic
context does not provide direct evidence about the identity of a concrete real person.
Therefore, even if drawing on culturalhistorical anthropology (e.g. Wulf, 2004) and
cultural psychology (e.g. Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1991) was important for introducing this
fundamental ambivalence into the heart of essentialist accounts of identity, it was not
enough to encompass the role of the individuals psychology in a non-essentialist
process of identity formation. In other words, linking culture to identity is a helpful
move towards questioning essentialism but does not necessarily enable an under-
standing of how individual subjectivity functions in relation to identity (a good example
of this limitation can be found in the identity capital model which goes as far as
developing scales for measurement of the culture-identity link s. Cote, 1997, 2000).
Undertaking a cultural history or genealogy of networks of meaning does not, in and of
itself, resolve questions as to how any given subject is related to these meaning
networks. There is here a ne difference between the existing meanings of a discourse
and the way individuals employ and use these meanings in their everyday lives. This
difference is particularly tricky to conceptualize because meanings do not exist unless
they are used by the actors of a certain social system (Luhmann, 1995). In addition,
social actors cannot use meanings which are fully private, since this would lead to the
break down of any communication (cf. the case against private language, Searle, 1995;
Wittgenstein, 1958). Hence, the ne difference is that social meaning and individual
meaning are irreversibly linked together and yet they are not identical. There is no direct
correspondence between individual and social meaning, it is rather a constant and
intimate relation of difference.
If we follow this idea stringently, we have to then formulate a conceptual grid by
which we would be able to trace the creation of individual differences in cultural
meanings. In other words, what is of importance here is that cultural meanings are not
identical for everyone but are subjectively appropriated and employed in the
individuals everyday life. This turn to subjective meaning was the major theoretical shift
initiated by various alternative psychological theories outside the UK in the 1970s and
1980s: from the subjects point of view, discursive meanings and practices can only be
understood as subjective meanings and practices, that is, as my meanings and practices
(Holzkamp, 1996).
German critical psychology, for example, acknowledges the importance of the
different contexts for the constitution of individuality, starts, however, not from
the context itself neither from a core idea of the self but from the process of the
subjective appropriation of a particular context (Holzkamp, 1983). This is the turn to
subjectivity, the turn to understand individuality from the standpoint of the subject
(Holzkamp, 1992). And here we have to highlight that the standpoint of the subject is
obviously always different, it is always particular for each individual. Subjectivity
according to critical psychology is always bound to the meanings and conditions of
existence but it is not identical to them; rather, it is a relation of possibility to the
existing meanings and conditions (Holzkamp, 1991). The turn to subjectivity asserts
that if we want to understand identity in contemporary societies we have to decipher
the processes involved in the production of subjective meaning. Any attempt to
explain identity simply by doing a genealogy of the production of meaning in a
certain institutional or sociocultural context is unable to engender an understanding
of the creation of subjectivity. Thus, instead of interrogating the fabrication of
cultural meanings the turn to subjectivity focuses on the exploration of subjective
sense.
By adopting the concept of sense I have turned to Vygotskys ideas. The
differentiation between sense and meaning which Vygotsky introduced into his
theory in the later years of his life (Vygotsky, 1934) refers directly to the theme of
self-articulation; that is, nding a voice by altering the given balance and content of the
existing symbolic systems. He claims that the meaning enclosed in words is not a
constant and unchangeable magnitude, but an available potency, which becomes
material in the literal meaning of the word through its subjective application
(s. chapter IV in Papadopoulos, 1999). He thus denes the possibility of the creation of
the non-identical. Meanings only exist, that is they become real, when they are used by
the subject. And the subjects use of meanings is a matter of constantly altering what has
been given in the symbolic. Psychological identity is thus never identical with itself; it
can be neither readable as a core psychic structure of the individual nor is it reducible to
the meanings existing in the discourses of a certain sociocultural context. Rather,
psychological identity is the constant oscillation between subjective sense and
discursive meanings.
The resemblances between Vygotskys and Wittgensteins (Wittgenstein, 1958)
theoretical positions are obvious. They both attack the objectivistic nomological
thought of traditional philosophy and traditional psychology. Wittgenstein had spoken
about the subliminal otherness, about the non-identical in language construction (cf. also
Wellmer, 1991) and Vygotsky tried to show how the non-identical in language is central
to the psychological constitution of the subject (thus, challenging traditional accounts
of identity). Both of them arrive at a similar thesis: the spoken word and objectied
experience are not aspects or dimensions of meaning, they realize meaning. However,
each of them investigates this assumption in different ways: Wittgenstein from the
perspective of the construction of meaning and Vygotsky from the viewpoint of the
individual. For Vygotsky, an utterance is steadily constituted by the existence of an
unrealized otherness: all of which remain invisible, marginal, strictly personal,
oppressed and nally unsayable. What is particularly fascinating in Vygotskys account is
that this unrealized otherness is not rooted somewhere outside the utterance itself, as
for example the unconscious in psychoanalytic approaches or some hidden innate
mechanism in nativist accounts, or, nally, a social reference in theories of socialization.
For Vygotsky unrealized otherness is simply an inherent feature of thinking and speech.
It is the result of their immanent unfolding. Thought is never complete and is never
exhausted in language. Thought is the affection of our bodies rather than the mere usage
of semiotic means (Vygotskij, 1996). When Vygotsky (1934, p. 281) says that thought is
always something whole, something with signicantly greater extent and volume than
the individual word, and that what is contained simultaneously in thought unfolds
sequentially in speech, he refers to the integrative power of subjective sense to unite
the sayable with the unsayable. My utterances are what I am, but what I am is more than
what you hear.
Subjective sense exceeds the possibility of an objective conceptualization in theory
and research because cognitive, volitional and emotional aspects, which cannot be
isolated as distinguishable features of subjective experience, converge in it (Fichtner,
1996; Papadopoulos, 1999; Vygotsky, 1934). Vygotsky rmly rejects any possibility of an
essentialist treatment of the constitution of the subject based on the operationalization
of various elements of consciousness (at least in his late works, since Wygotski, 1930).
The only chance for a humanization of psychology, according to Vygotsky, is to replace
the inhuman concepts we usually deploy in academic psychology with human ones
by returning to the everyday and the concrete (Wygotski, 1931, p. 146). Returning to
the concrete means for Vygotsky to look for psychology in the actual realization of each
individual in the irreversible passage of lived time. Here we can trace great resemblances
between Vygotskys theory and process philosophy, especially Bergsons (Bergson,
2001; Middleton & Brown, 2005, chapter 4) and Whiteheads (Kraus, 1998; Whitehead,
1979) understanding of experience as irreducibly linked to the immediate actuality of
our existence.
For Vygotsky, foregrounding the concrete, the irreducible totality of the
psychological facts incorporated in subjective sense, means dismissing all metapsycho-
logical attempts to clearly delineate and differentiate psychological processes. It means
returning to everyday subjectivity, a desideratum which Vygotsky formulates, following
Politzer (1929), by postulating the necessity of treating individual existence as a drama
(Vygotsky, 1929); that is, as a concrete subjective action in the midst of controversial,
dilemmatic social conditions (Hildebrand-Nilshon & Kim, 2002; Hildebrand-Nilshon,
Motzkau, & Papadopoulos, 2001; Se`ve, 1977). After all, human beings not only develop,
they construct themselves (Vygotsky, 1929, p. 65). And this construction, understood
as self-government, occurs in moments where the self is produced through the
subjective reorganization of discursive practices and meanings. In contrast to
widespread constructivist readings of Vygotsky (cf. Chapter III.7 in Papadopoulos,
1999), which suggest that governing the self is an effect of discourse, the reading I am
offering here holds that governing the self amounts to the insertion of subjective that is
unique biographical, affective and situational components into the meanings of the
discourse.
Conducting the self in Vygotskys psychology means realizing subjective sense in an
intersubjective situation, or better, it means the effort to transform the unsayable totality
of thought into a sayable communicative articulation. This attempt positions the subject
in a concrete argumentative and contentious context in which used meanings acquire
their importance and relevance for the individual insofar as they can be transformed into
subjective sense. Thus, being positioned in a discursive practice entails subordination to
the rules and contents which make the discourse sustainable and available for the
participants, but at the same moment it also entails self-articulation, that is the creation
of new interdependences between the self and others. This is the process of
individuation (in Vygotskys terms this is the primacy of inter over intra), a process of
non-personal becoming, a process where the common and pre-individual social
reality becomes gradually the ground out of which the singularity of the one occurs.
The understanding of the individual here is very different from its meaning in theories
of the autonomous self. Autonomy promotes individual freedoms and the cultivation of
individuality (Rose, 1996a). In contrast, individuation promotes singularity, enriching
what is already common, infusing social relations in the core of the singular
self (Simondon, 1992; Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006). Vygotsky captures this
moment with his concept of inner speech (our inner, elliptic, soundless, only
partly formalized speaking). Inner speech is the means through which subjectivity is
realized. It is the reection of reection, in other words the conduct of conduct.
And since subjectication is a process situated in discursive practices, inner speech
simultaneously involves the reproduction of discursive meanings and the liberation
from these. Inner speech is, as argued by Holzkamp (1996, p. 62), implicit
intersubjectivity in terms of its function for subjective experiences (Bradley, 2005) as
well as in a developmental perspective (Selby & Bradley, 2003).
The reading of Vygotsky which I presented in the previous paragraphs could very
much pertain to an understanding of the subject in German critical psychology
tradition, especially the work of Klaus Holzkamp (1993), and it could be also relevant to
some versions of activity theory (partly in Leontjew, 1977; and also in Rubinstein, 1977).
However, there is a second interpretation of Vygotskys work which leads to a very
different constitution of individuality and the self: the dissolution of individual
subjectivity in discourse. This second reading is particularly central for understanding
how the move out of essentialism bypassed the German or some Soviet readings of
Vygotsky and gave birth to the discursive/constructivist approaches to identity and
subjectivity which came to dominate Anglocentric non-mainstream psychology (Billig,
1996; Gergen, 1994; Gill, 2006; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Shotter, 1993b; Wetherell,
1996). This reading ignores Vygotskys account of the role of subjective self-articulation
and individuation and understands subjectivity as a discursive effect. Here, the subject is
recast as a discourse user and identities are variations tied to particular subject positions
(Davies & Harre, 1990) which emerge out of the deployment of the existing
interpretative repertoires (Billig, 1991; Wetherell, 1998).
If we reconsider the move from an essentialist understanding of identity to the
constructivist position, we can see how the sense/meaning tension, the process of
implicit intersubjectivity and nally the process of self-articulation/individuation give
way to the idea that identity is primarily constituted through discourse and language
(for a more detailed discussion of the problem and the ambiguities of Anglocentric
discursive psychology s. Stenner, 2005). According to this position, identity means
occupying one of the many various language positions existing in discourse. Here the
subject is tentatively identical with his/her specic sociolinguistic placement, while in
Vygotskys account the subject can never be identical with the social and with language.
As Seymour-Smith, Wetherell, and Phoenix (2002, p. 255) say:
Common to discursive and social constructionist research (Gergen, 1994; Riessman,
1993) is the claim that identity (personhood) is constituted and reconstituted through
discourse and is thus exible, contextual, relational, situated and inected by power
relations. Davies and Harre argue that who one is always an open question with a shifting
answer depending on the positions made available through talk, in interaction and
conversations. The storylines of everyday conversations provide us with a position to
speak from and they allow the positioning of others as characters with roles and rights.
For Vygotsky, the subject incorporates the wholeness of the contradictions entailed in
discourse. The subject is genuinely singular and different to herself, since she can never
reproduce a particular social position through her language expressions. Subjectivity is
embodied otherness, identity is impossible (Irigaray, 1985). This position brings me to
my next consideration and shift in the conceptualization of identity, one which not only
tries to overcome the language-centred and discursive foundationalism of constructivist
approaches but also the concept of identity as such (it is not a coincidence that in the
German and Soviet readings of Vygotsky the concept of identity plays a minor role). This
shift, described in the following section, reconsiders identity as embodied
subjectication.
Foucault and the move from a constructivist understanding of identity
to embodied subjectication
The modes by which we relate to ourselves through our connections to our social
context could be understood as processes of subjectication. According to the classic
Foucauldian denition, subjectication means examining the ways in which a person
transforms himself or herself into a subject (Foucault, 1994a). Notably, this
conceptualization of the subject in late Foucault is opposed to the abstract idea of the
philosophical subject (that is, a subject dened in advance by certain characteristics
which predetermine the results of any empirical investigation of real subjects
and anticipate the theoretical outcomes). The philosophical subject is a logical
construction conceived by means of a series of archetypical or substantial denitions:
the intentional, transcendental, decentred, saturated, deconstructed, integrative,
autonomous and so on. There is a great deal of work in psychology, sociology and
social theory which has contributed in deconstructing this philosophical conceptual-
ization of the subject (e.g. Bauman, 1997; Butler, 1990; Cadava, Connor, & Nancy, 1991;
Middleton & Brown, 2005; Shotter & Gergen, 1989). Their main critique is that the
philosophical subject has an intrinsic logic or better, an inherent purpose which
would or should be exemplied in every different person. The subject is understood
to be intact, consistent and separable from the continuous inuences of the real, social
conditions of her existence.
There is another way of speaking about the subject, albeit which still shows the same
bias as the philosophical one. This way can be derived from a specic sociological
reading of the writings of Foucault on power, especially in his work around the mid-
1970s. In this reading, the subject is mainly conceived as the object of the discourse. The
prerequisites of a philosophical foundation of the subject are replaced with the strict
dominance of disciplinary technologies. Foucault shows this in his discussion of the role
of confession in the 1st Volume of History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1978) or of the
individualizing and subjugating function of surveillance technologies in Discipline and
Punish (Foucault, 1977). Working with this sociological understanding of the subject
entails elucidating the conceptual, analytic edice of specic discourses in order to
formulate the signifying links which constitute and regulate the individual subject.
Foucault would rather speak of the subject-function in a specic discourse rather than
subjects of discourses (Foucault, 1984).
The constructivist conceptualization of identity, described above, draws on this
sociological understanding of Foucault. The problem with this reading of Foucault, and
with an understanding of identity as social positioning in dilemmatic discursive
contexts, is that it is language-centred and relies heavily on the investigation of existing
representations circulating in discourse. The constructivist approach to identity locates
subjective identity as the product of the ambiguities and controversies of discursive
practices. But it fails to recognize that there is more to subjectivity, an excess which
pertains to forms of social imagination which are beyond existing representations,
which are affective, contentious and not yet realized in nature. Bradley makes a similar
point in relation to the Theory of Mind which suppress their own imaginative and moral
dimensions (Bradley, 1993, p. 515), and others turn to psychoanalysis to insert this lost
perspective of indeterminacy in discourse (Billig, 1997). Instead of solely focusing on
existing representations of what is needed is rather, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos
(2001, p. 191) calls it, a sociology of absences, a procedure through which what does
not exist, or whose existence is socially ungraspable or inexpressible, is conceived of as
the active result of a given social process. Doing discursive analysis and constructivist
research on identity are as dry as the Anglocentric empiricist tradition in social
psychology can be. This is because they perpetuate the cult of empiricism in social
science research which conceives the investigation of existing representations be it in
qualitative or quantitative form as the primary starting-point for the generation of
knowledge (cf. various critiques of this: Groeben, 2006; Holzkamp, 1987; Smedslund,
1988; Tolman, 1991; Toulmin & Leary, 1985). And we cannot afford this in our current
conditions where identities are played out, not just as social positions, but as effective
and powerful tools which organize social and cultural processes of dominance inside
North-Atlantic societies as well as on a geopolitical scale. For future generations, the
xation on linguistic processes and discourse, this widespread bizarre belief of our
times, as Hayles calls it (1999, p. 199), will probably appear as a superstition
(cf. Papadopoulos, 2005). Here I want to assert that it is possible to question the
imperative to use discursive representations as hard empirical data and engage with them
as one of the many tools available for undertaking strategic politics ina situated process of
political action and engagement. As Donna Haraway says, language is not about
description but about commitment (Haraway, 1991a, p. 214; cf. also Haraway, 1988).
Without being able to introduce the possibility of making discursive analysis itself
the object of study that is understanding ones own research practice as a situated
cultural and political practice discursive/constructivist positions can only reproduce
the content of the existing representations under study and perpetuate the conditions of
their production. Adorno (1983) describes such a situation as the fabrication of ever-
the-same. Discursive foundationalism forecloses any possibility of understanding how
contested identities emerge as concrete everyday processes of materialization of
imagined social relations. Discourse analysis cannot deal with something which is not
already represented in discourse. And, as cultural studies have so vividly showed that
identity is always in the making because it entails a non-expressed otherness, a non-
discursied and imagined possibility of social relations (Hall, 1990; Papadopoulos,
2006). This is particularly important during the post-war period where identity politics
occupy a central place in the political life of North-Atlantic societies. We need a different
conceptualization of subjectication and identity in order to understand the strengths
and limitations of identity politics, as well as their inner-workings how people identify
with certain imagined cultural communities and groups of civil society in order to
account for the immanent, eventful (Badiou, 2001) and uid, strategic nature (Clifford,
2000) of subjectication and identity politics in contemporary societies. This immanent
and strategic emergence of identity always and necessarily entails a moment of
suddenness (Bohrer, 1998), a non-existent reorganization of the material and discursive
conditions of existence. Any account which fails to grapple with the contingent, non-
identical elements of identity, not only reies its subject matter, but offers a static and
limited picture of identity as a political tool.
Already in the 1970s and 1980s, cultural studies and gender studies identied this as
a limitation of existing concepts of identity. In response, they focused on the process of
articulation (Clifford, 2001; Hall, 1986a; Slack, 1996). Articulation attempts to rethink
the concept of Gramscian hegemony as a necessary element of the discursive
reductionism of many post-structuralist approaches to everyday cultural politics (Laclau
& Mouffe, 1985). The very idea of gender studies is based on the project of contesting
gender normativity and heterosexist dominance by rendering the symbolic increasingly
dynamic, that is, by considering the conditions and limits of representation and
representability as open to signicant rearticulations and transformations under the
pressure of social practices of various kinds (Butler, 1997, p. 23). Similarly, the very idea
of cultural studies (as well as science studies, s. Latour, 2004) is based on reworking the
opaque and resistant notion of ideology into something increasingly exible and
transformable through politics of hegemony: Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way
of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere
together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become
articulated, at specic conjunctures, to certain political subjects. Let me put that the
other way: the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather
than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it
enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to
make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those
forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position
(Hall, 1986b, p. 53).
The reinsertion of politics of articulation as hegemonic politics into the constitution
of identity corresponds to an alternative second reading of Foucault (opposed to the
sociological one described in the beginning of this section) which reintroduces an
important element of Vygotskys interest in sense/meaning and inner speech: that is, it
reminds us that when we speak about identity we have then to presuppose that the
individual is not exhausted in the signifying practices which he/she employs. Identity
cannot be conceived without a constitutive outside which surpasses existing meanings
and practices in the discourse. To put it another way, identity corresponds continuously
with a prescriptive lack: a lack consisting of unanswered or unperceived possibilities for
relating to the self and the other possibilities which have never been realized. Identity is
a closure, an exclusion, an attachment to a specic spatialized position only because it
can be so and not because it has to be so. Thus, the employment of an identity does
not necessarily regulate or overdetermine the individuals existence, but positions the
subject in the tension between coercion by institutional mechanisms (meanings and
practices) and articulation through them. In the theories following this second reading
of Foucault articulation has a double meaning: pronouncing subjective experience and
connecting and reconnecting existing meanings in ways which were not presented
before (Hall, 1986b, 1990). Hence, when the self-governed subject adopts identity, this
move can be understood as a relation between empowerment and subjugation to
political practices of liberal societies, between taking on meanings as they are and
reworking meanings with new content and with new practices.
It would be a mistake to claim that the cultural studies interest in articulation as a
means of theorizing identity is simply Foucauldian (Hall, 1996), I have been suggesting
that it relates to a second reading of Foucault, a reading which I want to briey consider.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Foucault began to introduce an idea of subjectication as a
tool for grappling with the possibility that subjects encounter not only ruptures in
discourse, but also opportunities to render these ruptures intelligible by questioning the
paralysing solidity of power mechanisms (Foucault, 1990, 1987). The ruptures are
interrogated in Foucaults turn to the subject in the last years of his life; he examines all
these shady, intermittently shifting possibilities for modifying the conditions of visibility
in a given discourse, ruptures which give rise to doubts about the prearranged,
persistent borders of existing practices (Deleuze, 1991).
This turn is in step with a well-known transformation of Foucaults understanding
of power. The earlier notion of power was that power is a monistic entity penetrating,
contaminating, prescribing and nally regulating individual existence through the
inescapable force of disciplinary mechanisms. This is gradually replaced by a view of
power as functioning through the open control and self-control of each individual.
Power is much more disseminated in various individualizing modalities, which could be
described as the government techniques of self-enterprising individuals (Foucault,
1994c, 1988).
The concept of government rests on the idea that power can be grasped only as a
communicative, intersubjective practice based on existing societal constraints and
conditions, and thus means acting upon present or coming actions in order to facilitate
or to nullify possible relationships to others (Foucault, 1994b). Government involves
both acting upon others and acting upon the self, and in this sense, it can be
comprehended as the various social rationalities and practices entailed when individuals
employ strategies for the conduct of conduct (Rose, 1996a). Government dispenses
with the restrictive notion of individual existence as coerced through various
disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms for exercising power, since it implicitly
introduces liberty as the constitutive outside of the subject. Here, liberty means the
freedom for self-enterprising; freedom as a stable number of possibilities through which
individuals exercise power. Power can only be accomplished by free subjects.
Hence, as Foucault reworks his understanding of power, there is a shift taking place
away from the question of how individuals identity is constructed. Rather Foucault is
interested in how individuals become subjects of a certain kind, that is how they relate
to themselves and to each other. These relationships are sustained by existing socially
fabricated meanings and practices, which achieve their relevance for each subject only
if they are actively used by the individual for conducting and managing everyday life. For
example, Foucault describes these technologies of the self extensively in the 2nd
Volume of History of Sexuality when he investigates how ones ethics and social
relations are shaped by the everyday sexual practices in ancient Greece (Foucault,
1987). How can we combine an account about different discursive formations and
modes of social government with an account about the ways individuals freely realize
these modes of government in their everyday lives in order to maintain the relation of
self to self and of self to others? How can we avoid the pitfalls of reproducing the idea of
a mere regulation of the individuals, namely by asserting that individual government is
shaped in a process of inscription of discourses?
This move against and away from the constructivist approach to identity has been
supported by the critical psychological concept of subjectication or, rather, embodied
subjectication (e.g. Blackman & Walkerdine, 2001; Burman, 1994; Rose, 1996a).
Working with Foucaults later approach to power and government involves examining
how specic practices and techniques operate with and beyond language and create
possibilities for the production of particular forms of embodied experience (Blackman,
2000; Dean, 1995; Kelly, 2006; Walkerdine, 1997). On the one hand, this work
investigates different representations of subjectivity within current cultural and media
production. On the other hand, it explores how these representations become
embodied through relational and situated practices of the subjects. Here it is important
to stress that embodiment does not refer to materiality (Papadopoulos, 2005). Rather, it
designates all these techniques which situate the individual body in discourse. That is
how one performs her position in discourse through her body, that is through particular
movements, gestures, body modications, habits of the esh, ways to talk and body
accessories. The central focus of embodied subjectication is how discourse is realized
by each one of us through our bodies. Using the words of Karen Barad, we could say that
critical psychology is interested in how discourse comes to matter and, in taking this
approach, it neglects important and difcult questions about how matter comes to
matter (Barad, 1998). In this sense, critical psychology reads the materiality of the body
solely as a semiotic battleeld and remains committed to embodiment as a pure question
of representation (Csordas, 1994, 1999).
If the discursive/constructivist notion of identity was always in discussion with
identity politics, embodied subjectication and the critical psychological approach
operate on the level of (and invigorate) micropolitical participation in social and
political processes. Micropolitics involve: (1) engaging with processes of
representation; (2) investing in the moment of reexivity as the possibility for
questioning the conditions of production of ones own subjectivity; (3) using
embodied activity as the performative realization of existing representations and (4)
prioritizing relational modes of conduct, that is relations between individuals or
actants. For example, the analysis of micropractices through which HIV-positive gay
men forge a relation to Anti-Retroviral Treatment illustrates how people adjust to the
immediate necessities posed by the treatment regimens by organizing a myriad of
social interactions beyond institutionalized regulation and xed representations (for
an extensive discussion of these examples s. Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006).
Although, there may be a common desire to respond to the expectation that people
take charge of treatments, the differentiated practices entailed in peoples responses
can open starkly different modes of relating to the self and to others. A focus on
micropractices reveals how all these different modes of subjectication unfold in
realms which are not hierarchically driven by health policies, by clinical management
agenda or by psychological discourses of control. The embodiment of personal
control is related to, but not determined by these sites. For example, being in
charge can act as a vehicle for a new trajectory into employment and work. In other
moments, it can require the renegotiation of ones relation to biomedical authority.
Alternatively, there are modes of relating to the imperative to take charge which
question the very possibility of that goal. New embodied subjectivities emerge
through differential relationship to representations of risk (Kippax & Race, 2003;
Race, 2001). The real possibilities being opened by biomedical advances in HIV
treatments force a move beyond any blanket criticism of biomedicine, beyond the
separation of medical and social domains of life. In this move, people reconstitute
themselves in relation to biomedicine, realizing possibilities for sociopolitical change
not through resistance to institutional or biomedical authority but through
actively organizing and reorganizing their relation to all the various actors in the
social eld. In the power relations of the post-Anti-Retroviral Treatment chronotope,
there is no one privileged subject imposing a dominant mode of sociality. There is a
network consisting of different actants for example, pills, doctors, patients, tests,
pharmaceutical companies, state institutions, community organizations and activists
(Flowers, 2001; Rosengarten, 2004). The ongoing transformations in the connections
between nodes in this network open new possibilities for living with HIV and close
others. Thus, the process through which change and contemporary everyday
sociability occurs cannot be understood as principally driven by state legislation and
policy but through the micropolitical practices of embodied subjectication.
Hence, micropolitics purposively work against the logic that posits the state (or other
grand institutions) as the genesis of sociopolitical change and of the subsequent
production of subjectivity (e.g. Connolly, 2002). Critical psychology has contributed to
this reconsideration of the relation between state policies and everyday sociality. Instead
of positing a hierarchical relation between the state and the social sphere, critical
psychology explores how embodied subjectivities emerge in the action of multiple,
networked, acentrically organized agents that is, the state is no longer understood as a
privileged entity of power. Now, instead of emanating from monolithic state institutions,
subjectivity is located in the relations between multiple actants involved in diversied
and often informal networks which perform and pursue different interests and political
agenda. In this section, I described the turn from constructivist understandings of
identity to the critical psychological concept of embodied subjectication as a particular
form of political practice in contemporary North-Atlantic societies. In the next part of
the paper, I will explore the historical and social situatedness of this critical
psychological turn to micropolitics and embodied subjectication and trace its
involvement in the production of afrmative subjectivity.
Micropolitics and the persistence of afrmative subjectivity in
post-Fordist conditions
The turn to micropolitics and the dissolution of the foundationalist understandings of
identity (either in its essentialist or discursive reductionist versions) enable political
analyses of previously neglected and effaced domains of everyday life. But do
micropolitics effectively challenge state regulation and open pathways for the
emergence of a multiplicity of different modes of embodied subjectication? Or does
embodied subjectication become a new mode of state regulated existence?
The power of micropolitics is thought to lie in the fact that they bypass the
reproduction of the state as an intact and paramount entity of power. Micropolitics
harness everyday lived and embodied experience as a vital matter of political struggles
which aim to reinvigorate civil society, that is, the struggles of associations of people
which develop outside of state institutions (Warner, 2002). However, seen historically,
since the 1980s micropolitics have increasingly become integral to the effective
realization of neoliberal governance. This is because this mode of engagement is aligned
with transformations which have occurred at the level of the state. The neoliberal state
is not a monolithic container, rather it disseminates into the most remote terrains of
everyday experience. The dismantling of welfare systems has accelerated, and nally
consolidated, the states withdrawal from the traditional role of centralized organizer of
society. However, the result has not been the disappearance of the state itself, rather we
are witnessing the disappearance of the welfare state and the emergence of new one
(Fairbrother & Rainnie, 2005; Jessop, 2002; Sassen, 1999). Social control is primarily
performed through the colonization of previously regarded private areas of individual
existence: the body, health, fashion and well-being, sexuality, your living-room. In this
process, embodied subjectication and micropolitics have become necessary elements
for the functioning of the neoliberal state. The neoliberal state needs, more than self-
regulating individuals, networked actors who actively forge the structures necessary for
the transformation from centralized state powers to disseminated modes of neoliberal
regulation (Marazzi, 1998; Neilson & Rossiter, 2005; Papadopoulos, 2003; Stephenson,
2003). Hence, although they arose as an attempt to challenge the overly narrowfocus on
the state, micropolitics have played a vital role in shifting the historical function of the
state from centralized control into a disseminated form of control which operates
effectively in the terrain of social and cultural life. In this sense, both state- and
micropolitics articulate their political agenda inside the terrain of the state and afrm its
function and centrality in social life. This is the moment where embodied
subjectication and the broader project of critical psychology amplify the production
of afrmative subjectivity, a subjectivity which paradoxically solidies state regulation
by operating at its margins.
However, the generation of afrmative subjectivity is more than a form of political
regulation in contemporary North-Atlantic societies. It is also a productive force in the
literal sense. The traditional apparatus for measuring and diagnosing individual
differences was insufcient as a response to the social and economical transformations
related to post-Fordist labour (Bowring, 2002; Gorz, 2004; Lazzarato, 2002; Moulier
Boutang, 2003; Williams, 1994). This is because post-Fordism appropriates as
productive resources precisely these forms of individual action and experience,
which refer to the totality of individual subjectivity: relationality, emotions, memory,
communication, creativity and primarily, the totality of the body. Critical psychologys
conceptualization captures the core tenet of the post-Fordist transformation in a
magnicent way: embodied subjectication becomes the algorithm for the realization of
the process of the subjectivization of work, a process which lies in the heart of post-
Fordist productivity (Lohr & Nickel, 2005; Moldaschl & Voss, 2003; Schonberger &
Springer, 2003).
Yet critical psychology neither traces possible ruptures in the post-Fordist
arrangement nor explores everyday forms of exodus and disobedience (Moulier Boutang,
1998; Virno, 2004). In other words, the critical psychological viewof subjectication can
elucidate, or diagnose, the productive role of the psychology in the social earthquake
which accompanied the post-Fordist reorganization of labour and everyday sociality in
North-Atlantic societies (Gordo-Lopez & Pujol Tarres, 2004; Papadopoulos, 2004).
However, critical psychology is unable to engage with the suppressed potentialities
of post-Fordist social relations which could lead to forms of political engagement
that question post-Fordism itself (Karakayali & Tsianos, 2005; Negri, 1999; Santos,
2001; Stephenson, 2004). The reason for this is, as I argued above, that embodied
subjecticationis the core productive formof todays sociality. Embodied subjectication
is not only a heuristic tool whichenables social researchers tounderstandpower relations
in post-Fordist North-Atlantic societies, but also the very guarantor of what Weber (1978)
calls legitimate domination. A form of domination which is actively and willingly
performed differently by each individual and congeals a formof power, which, following
Hannah Arendt (1970), emerges not as a means to dominate but by the very fact that
people act together. Embodied subjectication (and its very theoreticization by
governmentality studies) is a form of obedience to todays conguration of power in
North-Atlantic societies. In this sense, micropolitics and embodied subjectication
constitute a form of afrmative subjectivity in neoliberal and post-Fordist conditions. In
the last part of the paper, I will briey discuss Jacques Rancie`res concept of politics as a
means for interfering in the production of afrmative subjectivity (for a more broad
discussion of this issue s. Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006).
Interrupting afrmative subjectivity: Imperceptible politics
The opposition between micropolitics as the site of regulation and creativity and state-
politics or identity politics as normalizing and coercive no longer holds. This opposition
has a wide ideological function which results from a particular reading of Foucault in
which ethics is equated with politics, a very Eurocentric account indeed. There is a
marked difference between claims about the politicization of everyday life and the
assertion that we do politics through our very existence. If everything is political then
nothing is. So while it is important to show, as Michel Foucault has done magnicently,
that subjects are regulated through the micropractices of everyday life it is equally
important to say that nothing is political in itself merely because power relationships are
at work in it (Rancie`re, 1998, p. 32).
In order to interrupt and to overcome the production of afrmative subjectivity, a
shift in our understanding of politics is needed. Here, I want to propose that politics has
not primary to do with contesting given structures of domination by introducing new
diversications of law, that is, rules of equality, the codication of rights and the
cultivation of public responsibility. This seems to be a paradoxical proposition since
rules of equality, rights and responsibility constitute an indispensable and plausible part
of todays forms of active political engagement. However, in the following paragraphs I
want to argue that following recent political philosophy we have the possibility to
understand why this law-oriented form of political engagement works in a different way
than intended and ends up in crafting afrmative subjectivities. Thus, instead of this law-
oriented approach to political engagement I want to propose a justice-based approach
(Benjamin, 1996; Honig, 1993). Following Rancie`re (2001) and Badiou (2005), we can
say that true politics is a collective enterprise which exposes a given social order to be
limited, contingent and inconsistent. True politics attempts to include those who have
no place in the normalizing organization of the existing social order. However, the
placeless cannot be simply inserted by giving them a name (representation) and legal
visibility (rights) in an existing social order (on the limits of the double-R axion, i.e.
rights and representation, s. Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2007). Inclusion through the
granting of representation and rights does not question the structure of domination.
Such inclusion only serves to acknowledge that a particular community or group really
has no power to change the political order. A typical example of this is the proliferation
of camps in modern societies. Consider the role of camps as part of the colonial legacy
of Australia. The Indigenous population was interned in camps, missions and boarding
schools. The extraordinary in these camps is that the Aboriginal population was
included in the system of administration and regulation in order to become effaced and
excluded. The exclusion of the Indigenous population took place through their
inclusion in the system which controlled their whole existence and then systematically
marginalized them. And todays exclusion of the Indigenous population is in fact the
continuation of this complex exclusion/inclusion system of the older camps. With the
detention centres, camps returned back to Australian normality (and of course not only
to Australia!). And here we encounter the same phenomenon: detainees are included in
the system of camps in order to facilitate their exclusion and often their forced
deportation.
The camp is much more than the place of exclusion par excellence. It is a very
functional and necessary moment for the regulation of mobility and inclusion, but of
course a very particular form of inclusion which targets the social control of the
placeless and their mobility. Thus, we can say that racism and discrimination are not
problems of exclusion, they are problems of inclusion. So, against the widespread
position typically represented in Agambens work (1998) which regards the camp as
total exclusion and as manifestation of the state of exception, here I want to assert that
camps are symptomatic for exactly the opposite: their function is to include and to
insert mobile populations into the existing forms of social and political control. Camps
are social spaces which most drastically attempt to regulate the speed of the circulation
of migrational movements and to include them in the global organization of labour
(for a further elaboration of these points, see Andrijasevic, 2004; Ferrari Bravo, 2001;
Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008).
Being included simply on the basis of a regulatory or egalitarian principle actually
indicates that some parts of the society really have no role to play in governing.
Democracy involves the inclusion of people who otherwise have no part (Rancie`re,
1998). This necessitates a radically different form of inclusion, one which is not based
on the legal inclusion of certain groups on the grounds of the representation of their
difference. This leads to the obliteration of difference, since being included as different
does not guarantee equal participation in government. Rather inclusion can only create
truly equal social relations if it creates conditions where difference is not obliterated but
becomes completely imperceptible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Papadopoulos et al.,
2008). What politics are normally thought to be is in fact nothing more than the site
where the policing, standardizing, normalizing of difference functions through
visualization, representation and rights. For Rancie`re (2000), policing produces a
sensibility that can identify neither excess nor absence. The result is that society appears
to be comprised of completely identiable, self-evident groups or parts of people who
occupy the space that has been allocated to them and no other (cf. Stephenson &
Kippax, 2006). I introduce here the concept of imperceptible politics as a possibility for
breaking this form of policing. Politics (as opposed to policing) arises from the
emergence of the miscounted, those who have no place and whose capacities remain
imperceptible within the normalizing organization of the social realm. Refusing
representation is a necessary move for doing politics from the position of those who
have no part in community. Thus imperceptible politics does not refer to something
which is invisible. Rather it refers to social forces which are outside existing regulation
and outside policing.
This approach to politics suggests that there is something important missing in the
debates over the micropolitical or identitarian logic of constructivist, discursive and
critical psychologies. Unless embodied subjectication interrupts policing, it is not
politics. Unless subjectivity becomes committed to a collaborative, transformative
and universal project which undermines the afrmation of the given order which
regulates difference, it cannot address the issues of right and equality (Badiou, 2003).
However, the factual involvement of micropolitics and identitarian politics in the
consolidation of the neoliberal state proves the opposite. To do (true) politics
necessitates disidentication and imperceptibility. Politics do not end with the
afrmation of difference. They start from difference and entail a process of refusing who
one is supposed to be. Doing politics regures the perceptible, not so others can nally
recognize ones proper place in the social order, but to make evident the
incommensurability of worlds, the incommensurability of inegalitarian distribution of
bodies with the principle of equality. Politics, in this strict sense, is a refusal of
representation. Politics happens outside of the performative production of embodied
subjectivities. In other words, politics happens when reexivity is annulled and when
processes of collective modication of the material conditions of our bodies and our
perception are underway.
Materialization has a particular importance for overcoming policing and afrmative
subjectivity: it contests the notion that materiality is simply limited to the pervasive
techniques of the body (e.g. Mauss, 1978) and the powers of discourse (e.g. Wilkinson &
Kitzinger, 1996). Materialization commits to the practice of interrupting existing and
installing new apparatuses of bodily production (Haraway, 1991a). Imperceptible
politics entail working with collectively and materially organized imperceptible
experience beyond reexivity, identity, and embodied subjectication. More than 20
years after the rst call to change the subject of psychology (Henriques et al., 1984) the
subject has to change once again in order to incorporate imperceptible politics into the
research strategies of alternative psychologies and to account for the social and political
realities of North-Atlantic societies. The starting-point for this move could be an attempt
to question the pervasiveness of representationalism (Derrida, 1978; Olkowski, 1999).
Imperceptible politics call for moving away from representation as mediation between
us as researchers and the social groups and social realities under study. This means
challenging the rst function of representational: speaking-in-the-name-of (Spivak,
1999). The consequence of this is the restoration of the immediacy between research
and the political-realities it refers to. But going beyond this rst sociopolitical function of
representation, that is the speaking-in-the-name-of function, necessitates another one
move, one which might be even more important for a project of critical social research
and social psychology. This second move is to overcome the epistemological function of
representation: the belief that the objects under study be it in qualitative or
quantitative form stand-in for a social reality behind them (Bauman, 1987).
Overcoming the ubiquitous epistemology of stand-in means that our research is itself
involved in an immanent and materialist transformation of the realities in which it takes
place. Doing research in the ruins of representation (Olkowski, 1999) requires a
reorganization of critical social science which follows but, nally, goes beyond the
discursive, constructivist, and critical psychological positions. Such a research
programme could develop along the following ve research trajectories:
(1) Instead of investigating discursive and cultural representations, work with non-
representational, informal and imperceptible practices and experiences (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987; Papadopoulos et al., 2008).
(2) Instead of relying on reexivity for the creation of change, engage with affective
transformations (Braidotti, 2002; Brown & Lunt, 2002; Brown & Stenner, 2001;
Stephenson, 2004).
(3) Instead of focusing on subjective embodiment, explore processes of materializa-
tion which literally create new material actors (Barad, 2003; Haraway, 1997;
Papadopoulos, 2005; Schraube, 2005; Whitehead, 1979).
(4) Instead of relying on the notion of subjectication, focus on continuous and
dispersed forms of experience and multiplicity (Fraser, 1999; Irigaray, 1985;
Middleton & Brown, 2005; Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006).
(5) Instead of considering sociality as a relational process, rethink suddenness and
eventfulness in genuinely co-constructive and cooperative forms of sociality
(Badiou, 2001; Haraway, 2003; Hardt & Negri, 2004; Lenin, 1978; Stengers, 2000).
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berblick uber laufende Arbeiten. In H. L.

ber das Abenteuer des Kulturbegriffes in der psychologischen Theoriebildung

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ber das Abenteuer des Kulturbegriffes in der psychologischen Theoriebildung

konomie. In M. Von Osten

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