Abstract
In his newest book Society Against Itself, Howard Schwartz presents us with a provocative explanation of the problems facing the Western world today that challenges widely accepted views about the usefulness of equality and diversity policies in the workplace and in societal institutions in general. He does so by drawing on the psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious, the Law of the Father, and the Oedipus complex and offers a wide range of real life cases of institutional disorganization, upheaval and decay. A philosopher by training, he builds on a psychoanalytic tradition pioneered by Sigmund Freud, Gustav Le Bon and Herbert Marcuse as he takes account of psychological and inter-psychic mechanisms to explain political and social phenomena. Schwartz’s influential work on narcissism and organizational decay, published in Organization Studies in 1987, where he demonstrates how well meaning individuals engage in delinquent behaviour in order to protect the organizational ideal, has been an inspiration to many students of organizations. In certain ways, the current book is a continuation of Howard’s long preoccupation with organizational irrationality and socially sanctioned forms of destructivity, which he now transposes to the societal level. Society Against Itself is largely composed of case studies, but the theoretical groundwork of the arguments presented here can be found in his previous book The Revolt of the Primitive (2003).
The main thrust of his argument, which many will find controversial and others will reject out of hand as erroneous, is that the forces of political correctness which drive the programmes of diversity have destructive effects on organizations, not because of their imperfect implementation but because of the principles that underpin them. Schwartz argues that the forces of political correctness are antagonistic to the business of organization because they represent a form of moral assault on the right of the organization to exist and threaten the foundations of civilization, which depends upon it. This is so because the emotional processes underlying political correctness have to do with an attack on the symbolic figure of the father, which stands in for authority and the law in patriarchal societies. The turning away from Oedipal psychology and the rules and prohibitions of the Law of the Father, which make social life possible, is a regression to a primitive state of undifferentiated subjectivity that is associated with the pre-Oedipal figure of the mother. The following quotes encapsulate Howard Schwartz’s theorizing:
Anti-Oedipal consciousness takes the form of an assault on the objective character of the law itself. It asserts that there cannot be any such thing as objective law and that law always represents the interests of some groups over others. Sometimes, anti-Oedipal psychology leads to an attempt to reformulate the law in order to enhance the power of those seen as having been oppressed. (p. 35) One may easily imagine that this will have a considerable impact on an organization like the New York Times, whose business has always been defined by taking the paternal role within the Oedipal function, and reporting the objective truth. It would be replaced by a maternal orientation, nurturing the oppressed group and defending its own truth, which would be defined by its feeling of being oppressed by the ideas of the dominant group. (p. 52)
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the provocative arguments offered, Howard’s oeuvre is an intellectually honest book which aims to challenge many of our taken for granted beliefs and assumptions concerning issues of social justice and inclusivity, if only to enable us to revisit and to reaffirm our positioning on these matters. Honesty begets honesty. I have known Howard for the last six years as a colleague and a collaborator with whom I have shared my interest in psychosocial approaches to organizations and my long standing fascination with psychoanalysis.
As a feminist influenced by the post-structuralist thinking of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and many others, I cannot but disagree with the main argument of the book. Yet the purpose of this review is not to simply enter into a polemic, but rather to offer a critical appraisal of the work on its merits by a reviewer who happens to take a diametrically opposite view from that presented in the book. Below I attempt such a critique which I conclude by outlining briefly the key reasons of my disagreement that can also be read as an alternative explanation of the important phenomena discussed in Society Against Itself.
The book is a collection of chapters organized around its central theme and sub-themes dealing with issues of motivation, undermining of organizational structure, meaning, and ultimately, language itself, where diverse examples are used to illustrate each of these aspects. The first chapter addresses the issue of demotivation in organizations caused by rewarding the behaviour of those groups seen as previously oppressed and stigmatizing the traditionally privileged employees, irrespectively of the value of their work, using the examples of the Ford Motor Company and the Cincinnati and Seattle Police Departments. It presents us with cases of employees withdrawing from engagement with their tasks in the Ford Motor Company because the meaning of their work has been taken away from them on the grounds of their historical privilege as white men, and it is instead being replaced by a simple morality play aiming to reward and augment the standing of those who have had less status. In such environments driven by political correctness, the meaning of exchange is lost and the implementation of such policies is achieved at the expense of organizational effectiveness and efficiency with detrimental results for the company in question. Such an assault on the primary task of the organization or institution is even more pronounced in the case of the Police Departments in Cincinnati and Seattle, which are disabled from performing their role of protecting citizens against crime least they be accused of racial bias. In this instance, Schwartz argues, we are faced with an anti-Oedipal drive against those who enforce the law: the police.
In the subsequent three chapters, the book goes on to offer further examples of the attack on meaning that sustains organized life as shown in a case of plagiarism at The New York Times (Jayson Blair affair), and cases of political correctness and sexual politics gone astray in the United Church of Christ and Antioch College. The first of the three cases, which was co-written with Larry Hirschhorn, recounts the story of a black journalist whose case stands out because of his repeated failings at his duties at the New York Times, which included misreporting and plagiarising stories from other outlets, and whose behaviour was not confronted because of the paralysis caused by the dominance of the politically correct dogma espoused by the New York Times executives. The authors argue that this example of a double failure by the reporter and the executives can be traced back to the rejection of the father with his imposition of boundaries, in favour of the primitive fantasy of the return to primary narcissism with the mother. Similarly, the rejection by the United Church of Christ of rules and demands taking the form of specific moral principles leads to the dismissal ejection of the paternal church and its prohibitions, accepted by many parishioners, in order to establish inclusivity as its new governing principle. But, Schwartz (p. 109) claims, in reality, ‘the issue is not of universal inclusion but rather of forcing the exclusion of some, the traditional element, by forcing a choice over the inclusion of others’. The third case is about the downfall of Howard Schwartz’s alma mater, Antioch College, which originated with a strike in 1971, in which a group of inner-city black students was used as a battering ram against the College itself, representing the paternal function. The assault on the institution was energized by a virulent sexual politics that excluded white males and, in the name of sexual diversity, led to a situation where: ‘sex, which was celebrated at the Antioch to the point of being the core of just about everyone’s identity, was paradigmatically, homosexual’ (p. 160).
The concluding chapters bring the common traits from the preceding stories together in order to construct a theory of organizational hysteria, which is exemplified by the evolution of the model of ruler from Queen Elizabeth, associated with the paternal self-constrained model, being replaced by that of a self-indulgent, emotional and hysterical Princess Diana, aptly named the Queen of People’s Hearts. Organizational hysteria, Schwartz posits, bears unmistakeable traits of self-sufficient unrestrained femininity which is spontaneous and experiences the male as a threat to her self-sufficiency, but is not real or viable as it belongs to the realm of the illusionary fantasyland.
Howard Schwartz poses important questions about the process and the nature of ‘othering’ as he exposes the flawed logic of political correctness. The problem that his work highlights is how can we avoid creating new others as we legitimize the groups of previously excluded, which plagues most identity politics and movements aiming to redress previous long standing injuries. Because of the impossibility of expressing the gravity of injury of marginalization suffered for so long, sometimes a hyperbolic rejoinder is necessary, as Judith Butler (1993, p. 37) points out. But we must also take account of Tina Chanter’s (2010, p. 228) warning:
Given the frequency with which attempts at political enfranchisement resort to tactics that, whether consciously or unconsciously, malign or abject minority groups, one might conclude that there is indeed an ineluctable tendency for even apparently radical politics not only to blind themselves to the claims of other minority group but to enforce the minority status of such groups all the more stringently in an effort to secure viable political platform.
Schwartz is careful not to attribute the destructive results of political correctness in institutions and organizations to individuals or groups of individuals, whether they are women, blacks or homosexuals, but is rather concerned with a shift to an anti-Oedipal constellation, and the feminisation of Western culture which results in its undoing. However, the answers Howard offers to this dilemma are less useful than they might have been. This is because the various underprivileged groups are seen as mere passive actors who are trapped in acting out the conflict between spontaneity and self-restraint, or Dionysian and Apollonian, which are parts of every psyche (p. 161), rather than as autonomous agents. The proposed approach is problematic not only because it fundamentally refuses agency to the oppressed groups but more importantly because it implicitly sees the work of organizations and societal institutions as a male pursuit which needs to be governed by the Law of the Father.
This theorizing is strongly influenced by what feminists have denounced as the patriarchal roots of psychoanalysis. The fallacy of psychoanalysis, which is particularly evident in Lacan’s work, as many feminists have argued, is that the entry to the symbolic and to subjectivity is predicated upon the subject’s taking up a gendered position in relation to the phallus, as the master signifier (Lacan, 1998) that defines meaning and determines the process of the subject’s becomingness. Luce Irigaray (1985) was one of the first psychoanalyst feminists to reject the universalistic discourse of psychoanalysis which benchmarks humans in accordance with the heterosexual male norm, leading to sexual and political domination over women and, arguably, over some men who find themselves outside of this norm. Irigaray has also explored the formal problem of theorizing the difference without reverting to the logic of the Same (Chanter, 2010, p. 220), which is of particular relevance to Howard Schwartz’s work but is also of wider applicability whenever we intend to address exclusion but fall into the trap of creating new forms of alterity. Julia Kristeva has in turn restored the importance of the maternal in the constitution of subjectivity, and has rehabilitated it from the association with the pre-lingual and pre-social, that conventional psychoanalytic theory has relegated it to. She has argued that the separation of the maternal body from culture and the contribution to organized social life is maintained by separating and rendering it abject (Kristeva, 1982). Yet women as subjects are defined by their belonging to the symbolic. Furthermore, Butler (2000) rejected the universality of such symbolism and asked us to ponder what might have happened to kinship relations and forms of organizing if a female figure such as Antigone was chosen to embody the fundamental psychoanalytic conception of identification instead of that of Oedipus?
Schwartz’s suggested way out from the challenges Western society faces in terms of accommodating its various ‘others’ is futile and ultimately self defeating because there is no possibility to return to the ideality of patriarchal organization. Such an organization of society was never an ideal one to start with as it was predicated on denying subjectivity to all categories of gendered, racialized, sexualized and classed others. A return to the Law of the Father that Society Against Itself advocates, does not only presuppose exclusion, which I do not believe Howard would endorse, but also appears to rest on the erroneous beliefs that values are given, fixed and unchangeable and that the unconscious dynamics that Howard relies on in his theorizing can be rationalized and made knowable. The lasting contribution of psychoanalytic theory is that the unconscious must always remain beyond our reach even as we strive to make it more transparent. Lacan’s work is particularly telling in this respect as it breaks with the whole notion of stable, definable and retrievable identity. The challenge therefore is not to repudiate alterity, which stands in for the strangeness of the unconscious and the unwanted part of self (Kristeva, 1991) and which often underpins individual and collective identifications as the foundation of social and communal life, but to seek means that mobilize social imaginaries and symbolize multiplicity in an equi(valent) way without reverting to and reproducing the logic of the one, either in the guise of conservative regression or progressive radical politics. Howard Schwartz’s book poses a challenge and it is upon us to respond to it.