Critiques of psychology's complicities with the ideological workings of capitalism have focused on psychologies developed prior to the 1980s, against which discursive and postmodern theories are often positioned as liberatory or revolutionary. Critical Marxist theory and anthropologies of finance are used here to frame a genealogy of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell's seminal text of discourse analysis Discourse and Social Psychology that challenges this narrative. We focus on the ontological differences between Potter and Wetherell and the modernist theorists of language and social order that they cite: Noam Chomsky, John Austin, and Harold Garfinkel. We argue that the ontology of both personhood and research within this text converged with the subjectivities constituted and required by late capitalism that dislocate and dispense notions of individual accountability upon which earlier modes of capitalism depended.
This response to Wetherell and Potter (2015) clarifies both what our article (Hayter & Hegarty, 2014) did and did not attempt to do and considers how to address the questions that it raised. We re-state that genealogy is aimed at opening up questions about present consensus rather than formulating alternative competing psychological systems. We reflect on our own locations in social psychology which lead us to open up questions about the positioning of Potter and Wetherell's work in late capitalism. We consider alternative answers to the questions that our article raises about their work, and argue that David Harvey's work might be of broad utility in framing not only Potter and Wetherell's work, but also in framing a broader -and more global -history of social psychology.
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