ABSTRACT
Approaches to discursive psychology following the postmodern turn in the human sciences recognize that language does not transparently reflect social relations but builds them (Wetherell, 2001; Hepburn & Potter, 2003), and that “the subject of discourse cannot be outside discourse … [or] power/knowledge as its source and author” (Hall, 2001: 79–80). One cannot, as Vygotsky (1978) might promise, do anything to escape the necessary formations of subjectivity, an awareness of which defines postmodernism. This subjectivity, though said to be socially sedimented in historical practices of public talk and writing, maintains an untheorized integrative aspiration “towards a particularly social phronesis” (Malone & Roberts, 2010). Through the adoption of particular language games over others, and the generative interposition of one social code against another, these approaches simultaneously mount an external critique of representation as epistemological limit, while problematically preserving for the interiority of the subject an invisibly undivided presence. The pragmatic orientation within postmodern discursive psychology—wherein subjects attain a kind of Lockean fashioning of “punctual selves” (Taylor, 1989) writ large—ignores that epistemic failure of representation, which for Foucault (1966/1973) occurs at the end of the eighteenth century, and results in finitude as a structural vanishing point in the formation of the modern subject.
