Abstract
The recent turn to Lacan’s work in critically-oriented Organization and Management Theory signals a welcome focus on one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers. This article introduces Lacan’s thesis on gender, making a case for its importance for understanding organizations. We discuss two contrasting receptions to Lacan’s Seminar XX, from pro- and anti-Lacanian feminists, offer our own interpretation which can be summed up as a Lacanian inspired parody of the phallic signifier, and argue that Lacanian theorists should turn Lacan’s ideas back upon them/ourselves to question critically our own positions. Further we review Lacan’s seminar XVII and its analysis of four dominant discourses—the university, the master, the hysteric and the analyst. The advantages of the discourse of the hysteric for a Lacanian politics of gender, enabling us to undo our arguments from outside of our own gender and identity, are then identified. We thus advocate conceptual and empathetic (hysterical) bisexuality for critical scholarship within organization studies that already, perhaps unawares, is hysterical. This allows us to avoid, as much as possible, slipping into the frozen and sterile discourse of the master.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. (Milan Kundera interview with Lois Oppenheim, 1989)
The recent turn to Lacan’s work in critically-oriented organizational scholarship 1 signals a welcome, if somewhat belated, focus on one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers. There has been a proliferation of articles using major aspects of Lacan’s theories to analyse core organizational issues such as identity (Driver, 2009; Hoedemaekers, 2010) and resistance (Hoedemaekers and Keegan, 2010; Roberts, 2005), but two crucial aspects of Lacan’s work remaining to be explored are gender and sexuation. These aspects are fundamental to understanding Lacan’s work for three reasons.
First, the psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity at the heart of his work cannot be considered outside processes of sexuation and gendering: psychoanalytical theory argues that accession to sexed and gendered identities is a precondition for the development and mental life of the individual (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973). Living subjects are irreducibly sexed: sexuation precedes culture (Moore, 2007) and, thus, organizations. Second, Lacan’s redefinition of sex as something that is not given by biology but through symbolic signification, 2 and thus arising through laws, cultural norms and rituals, has implications for organization and management theory (OMT). Third and finally, Lacan’s theory of gender has political significance arising from its very mixed reception by feminists. Notable feminist theorists criticize Lacan for ignoring the idea of sexual difference and equating woman with (unsymbolizable) nature (Grosz, 1990; Irigaray, 1985, 1993; Kristeva, 1982, 1986; Moi, 2004), while other influential feminist thinkers see Lacan’s work offering much to feminism and gender studies (Brennan, 1993; Copjec, 2004; Mitchell and Rose, 1982). The former position implies that an uncritical reading of Lacan’s work in organizational theory could subtly but surely reinforce misogyny, while the latter suggests the opposite, that Lacanian theory could be invaluable in helping overcome continuing discrimination against women (Ford and Harding, 2008). We will argue below that without integration of Seminar XX and related discussions on sexuated subjects, the appropriation of Lacan’s work in management theory may offer a partial, exclusionary reading of his work, and sexism and gender blindness in organizations could thus be perpetuated.
Academia, including critical management studies, is riddled with casual sexism, racism, ageism or homophobia made all the more graphic because these contradict the proclaimed goals that many critical scholars espouse. The continuing misogyny of the academy is reflected in Lacanian management and organizations studies (Fotaki, 2010), and Ashcraft (2011) has shown how prevalent is the silencing of women’s voices even in critical management studies. At the same time we are convinced that Lacan’s writings offer scholars working in a broad critical tradition ways of developing a politics of organizational gender aimed at bringing about changes in the symbolic order. To make the first tentative steps towards such a politics, this article will introduce Lacan’s thesis on gender to organization and management theory and point towards ways of using it to develop more egalitarian and emancipatory practices.
The article’s goals are, more broadly, to challenge the absence of discussions of gender from recent writings that use Lacan’s work to further understanding of organizations and management, and to disrupt the masculine significations and images that dominate organizational theory, including critical management scholarship. We aim specifically to undermine the encoded violence and insidious forms of power contained within organizational (including academic) gender structures. Lacan’s work is used to show that these structures are not ontologically given but are arbitrary and highly tentative masquerades open to change. Our second and related aim is to identify the advantages of the discourse of the hysteric for a Lacanian politics of gender, enabling us to undo our arguments from outside of our own gender and identity. This also might offer the first steps towards a Lacanian politics of gender in organizations, one in which the phallus’s pretension to power is undone by (hysterical) laughter.
To this end, we firstly explore two contrasting interpretations of Seminar XX, in which Lacan discusses female sexuality in most depth, and then offer our own interpretation which can be summed up as a Lacanian inspired parody of the phallic signifier. We then argue that Lacanian theorists should turn Lacan’s ideas back upon them/ourselves to question critically our own positions. This requires us to turn a reflexive lens back onto our own endeavours as researchers and scholars, and onto Lacanian theorizing in OMT writings more generally, a task assisted by Lacan’s Seminar XVII and its analysis of four dominant discourses—the university, the master, the hysteric and the analyst drawn upon in the discussion section. Seminar XVII offers an innovative way of reflecting upon ourselves as complex subjects who occupy different positions and offers different versions of the ‘I‘ that should each be reflected upon. In turning a Lacanian lens back upon OMT we show how easy it is for management and organization theorists to slip into the discourse of the master. We conclude by suggesting a politics involving a self-conscious, bi-sexual hysterical position for critical management scholarship that already, perhaps unawares, is hysterical. This position allows us to avoid, as much as possible, slipping into the discourse of the master, from where neither change nor new knowledge generation is ever possible.
Lacan and organization and management theory: development of a field of study
The last decade has seen an outpouring of applications of Lacan’s work to various aspects of organizations and management. His seminars have been used to explore: the failure of imaginary identity constructions (Driver, 2009), identity as constructed in the process of becomingness (Harding, 2007), power and resistance in organizations (Roberts,2005), aspects of embodied subjectivity (Driver, 2008), and various empirical issues including: envy in the workplace (Vidaillet, 2007); organizational burnout (Vanheule and Verhaeghe, 2004; Vanheule et al., 2003) and organizational dynamics (Arnaud, 2002). Moreover, Lacanian frameworks have been creatively employed for developing alternative theorizing on public administration (McSwite, 1997) and for linking public policies to debates in OMT (Fotaki, 2009, 2010). A special issue of Organization on Lacan (2010) provided a forum for further theoretical and substantive debates, outlining in some depth Lacanian ideas of desire, enjoyment and lack in relation to organizational issues (Bicknell and Liefooghe, 2010; Böhm and Batta, 2010; Hoedemaekers, 2010; Johnsen and Gudmand-Høyer, 2010; Woźniak, 2010). However, there is a curious absence of Lacan’s thesis on gender in this outpouring of publications, in which Lacan’s oeuvre has otherwise been drawn on in much of its rich detail. A rare exception is Kenny (2009), who warns that without understanding of Lacan’s thesis on gender, Lacanian inspired theorizing about organizations may perpetuate a misogyny it more consciously battles against.
Space allows us to illustrate the absence of gender from only some core articles in Lacanian OMT where such an omission is little justified. One of the earliest and most influential publications is Roberts’ (2005) study of the role of images and identification as a means of social control. Roberts amalgamates Foucaultian and Lacanian theories in line with Butler’s (1997) earlier work. Butler figures eminently in Roberts’ work because, as he argues, her reading of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia is important ‘for our understanding of processes of control and how they are effected and effective’ (p. 622). Yet after the cursory acknowledgement of ‘Butler pursuing the thought that the heterosexual ‘norm’ depends upon repressed, denied and abjected homosexuality’ (p. 634), the author glides over to theorize identification as if it were not that profoundly embodied and gendered process explored in great depth by Butler. Nowhere are we to find Butler’s central preoccupation with the consequences of drawing on Oedipalized metaphors for gendered identification; nor is there even a faint acknowledgement of Butler’s (2000) later question, about what would have happened to kinship relations and forms of organizing if a female figure such as Antigone were chosen to embody the fundamental psychoanalytic conception of identification.
A similar appropriation of Butler’s central notion of performativity is to be found in Driver’s (2008) work on food and subjectivity. She explores how narratives of food are employed to perform embodied subjectivity in organizations in order to deflect a failure to articulate who we are and what we want (p. 932). Driver acknowledges Butler’s preoccupation with the body ‘as a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field’ (Butler, 1990 cited in Driver, 2008: 929), to argue how the lack of the subject is externalized amongst other ways in food practices (p. 929). Reading such an insightful article left us wondering about the different ways in which the ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ Driver quotes use their embodied subjectivities in organizations, differences manifested in the ways men and women occupy space (Tyler and Cohen, 2009), act (Trethewey, 1999) and voice or silence their presence (Fotaki, 2010; Simpson and Lewis, 2005).
Finally, of the more recently published articles drawing on Lacan’s ideas we look at Woźniak’s (2010) work devoted to the development of the subject of science in relation to the Symbolic Other. As in the case of previous authors, Woźniak’s use of Lacan, in this case to undermine the very scientific condition which has allowed for its development in the first place, is insightful. Nevertheless, again no consideration is given to the fact that development of scientific discourse or subjectivity occurs, as Lacan stresses, in a gendered symbolic. In all these works, the organizational subject is tacitly assumed to be male (Acker, 1990). When the masculine is the tacit (intellectual) norm, organizational structures are presumed to be gender neutral, leaving no space for acknowledging, let alone exploring, how men and women are affected differently by them, because the gendered nature of organizational structures is partly masked by the obscuring of the embodied nature of work (Acker, 1990).
In sum, the absence of an analysis of gender in the work of Lacanian OMT, despite its centrality in his oeuvre, suggests a tacit assumption of a body-less and gender-less organizational subject. This, we argue, is misogynistic as it perpetuates and reinforces the supposedly neutral schemata that, in practice, valorize masculinity. Also striking is the absence from the authors of a(n) (Lacanian) analysis of the desire motivating them to write such articles. Are they/we not pursuing an impossible attempt to place themselves/ourselves as academics, outside the socio/psychic approaches used, and thus not taking account of our own emotions and affect? In order to address this gap we introduce Lacan’s thesis on femininity, which is crucial to understanding how the symbolic order and organizations within it are structured. Furthermore, in exploring two highly conflicting interpretations of Seminar XX and its thesis on gender we demonstrate the limitations imposed by using uncritical interpretations of Lacan’s work, while in offering our own alternative reading we follow the lead of other disciplines in taking Lacan’s work in new directions. Taking our inspiration from Seminar XVII, in the final section of the article, we then do what we advocate for others and turn Lacanian theory back on ourselves, with the aim of developing further understanding of gendered organizational theorizing.
Turning to Lacan and gender
Sexuality and gender are fundamental not only to Lacan’s work but to psychoanalytical theory in general. A subject cannot ‘be’, cannot acquire self-hood, unless it becomes gendered. The symbolic, and in our case organizations within the symbolic, cannot therefore be understood without cognisance of Lacan’s theories on sexuation and gender. However, a singular reading of Lacan’s ideas on the feminine, gender and sexual difference is impossible: his writings are notoriously difficult to understand, perhaps deliberately so: you are not obliged to understand my writings: if you don’t understand them, so much the better—that will give you the opportunity to explain them. (Lacan, 1998b: 34)
His work is thus ‘a permanently available site of contested meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 21). The result in other disciplines is profound disagreement about how to interpret Lacan’s work in general and his notorious thesis on sexual difference in particular, as we will now discuss.
In Lacanian terms, entry to the symbolic, and to subjectivity, is predicated upon the subject’s taking up a gendered position in relation to the phallus, i.e. the master signifier (Lacan, 1998a, 1998b; Moi, 2004: 858). This is a super signifier in the symbolic order that gives meaning to other signifiers (Brennan, 1991). Moi (2004: 851) argues that ‘since Lacanian theory defines femininity as a specific relationship to the phallus, no discussion of femininity in Lacan can afford to overlook what he has to say about this contested symbol’. The importance of this particular symbol for subject-production (subjectivization) cannot be emphasized enough.
Lacan argues that males desire to have and women desire to be the phallus. The elevation of a symbol that often refers to the penis, alongside the importance given to other masculine terms such as the Name of the Father (Frosh, 1994), divides feminists’ reactions to Lacan’s work. Further, much debate has been occasioned in other disciplines by Lacan’s notorious statement: ‘There’s no such thing as Woman’ (Lacan, 1998a: 72); and so the ‘“her” … does not exist and … signifies nothing’ (Lacan, 1998a: 145), and by his further elaboration on the position of woman in relation to the phallus: Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say the signifier of desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. (Lacan, 1982 in Mitchell and Rose, 1982: 84)
Given the complexity of Lacan’s language and changes in his ideas as they evolved, it is perhaps not surprising that feminist interpretations of Lacan’s thesis on gender not only differ but can be divided into two almost diametrically opposed schools of thought: one that accuses Lacan of misogyny and one seeing potential within his theses for furthering the feminist struggle for empowerment and against sexualized oppression.
This makes it difficult to summarize Lacan’s thesis on gender for theorizing about organizations and management; it requires introduction through two very different and divergent interpretations by feminist theoreticians, and notably their reading of the concept ‘the phallus’, as we discuss next.
Competing interpretations (1): feminists contra Lacan
Many feminists denounced the patriarchal roots of psychoanalysis and its reproduction of the notion of sexual difference as a negative ontological predicament (Cixous, 1986; Irigaray, 1985; Kristeva, 1982). Others have interpreted Lacan’s use of the terms ‘phallus’ and ‘penis’ as referring to the same object, and have protested at the choice of this particular symbol to represent the master signifier, one which also signifies sexual difference and lack (Gallop, 1985; Moi, 2004). What many feminists object to is not, of course, the use of symbols, but the particular symbol chosen (Moi, 2004: 104 italics in the original) to explain the construction of meaning. In Lacan’s theory it is the phallus that provides stability in the symbolic order to which the subject submits (Oseen, 1997). Gallop (1985) indeed has argued that ‘The Lacanians’ desire clearly to separate phallus from penis, to control the meaning of the signifier phallus, is precisely symptomatic of their [Lacanians’] desire to have the phallus, that is, their desire to be at the centre of language, at its origin’ (quoted in Butler, 1990: 57). The metaphorical relationship between the phallus and the penis (Butler, 1993) present in Lacan’s work, privileges the masculine imagery of the male member in ways that not only represent the social order but embed and drive this relationship into the deepest levels of the psyche. In such a context woman lacks her own signification other than the one articulated through the symbols of (male) phallic power and the male discourse of knowledge (Brennan, 1991). The use of such a phallic/penile metaphor has a performative effect on women: in forming the basis of phallogocentric scientific discourse it denies woman her own signification, and renders her powerless as a co-creator of meaning in the symbolic order (Fotaki, 2010).
Theorists who see Lacan’s conceptualization of the feminine as politically subversive and potentially incompatible with the goals of women’s emancipation and feminist strategies have included in various times Cixous (1986); Grosz (1990); Irigaray (1985, 1991, 1993); Kristeva (1982, 1986) and Moi (1986, 2004). There is insufficient space here to discuss the work of major feminist psychoanalysts such as Kristeva (1982, 1986) or Cixous (1981, 1986) (although see Fotaki, 2010 for a discussion) but Irigaray’s work offers a particularly powerful illustration of some feminists’ responses to Lacan. She 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. By stressing the power of this patriarchal symbolic order in language, science and philosophy from Plato to Freud, Irigaray (1985) turns against the uncritical discourse of psychoanalysis to confront ways in which the theory itself reproduces a structure of sexual difference founded on the absence of woman’s own symbols of representation. Standard psychoanalytic theory in general and Lacan’s work in particular is, according to Irigaray (1985), concerned with male identity formation and the definition of the female as its corollary. The woman is ‘the other’ and is defined in relation to the same which is tacitly assumed to be masculine (Irigaray, 1995). Specifically, she argues that the feminine is therefore habitually relegated to the position of matter, material or object against which the masculine positions itself (Irigaray, 1985). Put differently, by defining power symbolically in phallic terms the masculine is valorized, the feminine denied.
However, as one of the most important post-Lacanian theorists, Irigaray is not concerned with promoting a biological essentialism as she explores the formal problem of theorizing difference without reverting to the logic of the Same (Chanter, 2010: 220). Her aim is rather to expose the foundations of that metaphysics in Western thought which enables and conditions the dereliction of woman (Irigaray, 1985). In ‘An Ethics of Sexual Difference’ (Irigaray, 1993) she posits that the denigration of women will not cease without restoring another, equivalent way of being for woman, one which involves finding new ways of expressing and symbolizing sexual difference.
In summary, Irigaray and similar post-Lacanian feminists, such as Kristeva and Cixous, argue that Lacan perpetuates a masculine language, symbolized by the elevation of the penis/phallus to an over-arching position, and so denies woman language, the power to speak and be heard, and the power to be represented. Feminists are concerned about the impact of Lacan’s equating power with the phallus, which is often conflated with the penis: because this relation is signified in language, it bars the feminine body from symbolic signification in her own terms. In short, Lacan exiles the idea of Woman from the Symbolic and positions her as the Other (i.e. not man).
Competing interpretations (2): feminists for Lacan
An equally powerful school of feminist thought argues that Lacan is a theorist who explains and thus helps to tackle the subordination of women. Feminist theorists more sympathetic to Lacan’s idea of feminine sexuality include Brennan (1993); Campbell (2004); Copjec (2004); and Mitchell and Rose (1982). They do not try to position Lacan as if he were a feminist but read him as offering insights that can be used productively by feminist theorists (Campbell, 2004). Together, these theorists interpret Lacan as showing that the modern Western world rests precariously upon gendered and sexed identities that are not only arbitrary and tentative, but painful, desiccating and alienating for subjects occupying the place of both the man and the woman. Such a thesis, they suggest, opens up the possibility of achieving change in the symbolic because these are no more than constructed schemata: as Lacan stated, ‘there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as a male or female being’ (Lacan, 1998a: 204). This suggests that gendered identities are fixed neither by biology nor culture but are utterly constructed, thus undermining for some the charges against him of misogyny.
Mitchell and Rose (1982) offered the first translation into English of Lacan’s writings on gender, or more correctly on ‘the woman’, found in Seminar XX. Lacan, in their interpretation, breaks down any presumption about the fixity of genders, for he shows that gender is an always precarious achievement, one that is compulsory, requires constant work, and is attached not to biology but to the subject positions we enact. They translate Lacan as saying that sexual difference is ‘a legislative divide which creates and reproduces its categories’ (1982: 41). In Lacan, Mitchell and Rose (1982: 29) write, we see an account of ‘the fictional nature of the sexual category to which every human subject is … assigned’. Thus ‘male’ and ‘female’ are notions emerging out of fantasy (p. 33). The ‘feminine’, it follows, ‘is constituted as a division in language, a division which produces the feminine as its negative term. If woman is defined as other it is because the definition produces her as other. The emancipatory potential of Lacan’s arguments, Rose suggests, lies in seeing that the male, like the female, is subjected within the symbolic order. Lacan’s work, in this interpretation, exposes the ‘fundamental imposture’ used in the subordination of the female (Campbell, 2004).
Brennan (1993) builds on that interpretation through identifying in Lacan’s work an elucidation of the conditions by which the monadic, individualistic, modern Western individual could emerge and be sustained. The precarious self-hood of this subject requires the establishment of two sexes, with the male ego in modernity requiring the rendering passive of the female ego so as to secure its tentative self-image and thus its entry into the symbolic (p. 59). Brennan reads Lacan as saying that the dominant ego in this capitalist era is psychotic, with a belligerent imperative to enslave the other. Capitalism has a ‘totalizing imaginary fixation’ (p. 50), but its ‘aggression is contained by the psychic fantasy of woman’ who is ‘the losing side in the ego’s master-slave rivalry’ (p. 49). In sum, for Brennan, Lacan offers a theory which, in showing that the psychic economy of the modern era’s ego rests upon woman’s being pacified, explains (rather than perpetuates) the subordination of the female.
More recently, Copjec’s extraordinary Imagine There’s No Woman (2004) seeks to show that Lacan’s thesis concerns the extreme unhealthiness of gender. Copjec argues that there is in Lacan’s work the theory that women must invent themselves as women, that is, as objects different from themselves. Femininity is a masquerade, the ‘I’ of the subject a hole in being, a ‘passionate inference’ (p. 66), an experience of the body arising out of a concentration of psychic energy on a single goal. The female body, that which says to the woman that she is woman, is therefore a semblance—the body is female because the law requires that it be female. Copjec is rare because she draws out a thesis on masculinity from Lacan’s writings, one that has similarities to Derrida’s (Derrrida and Wills, 2002) discussion of the shame of man’s nakedness. The male speaking subject, Copjec argues, is infused with shame, a shame that arises, as Freud had articulated, through seeing the self in its sexual member (p. 214).
These pro-Lacanian feminist readings see in his ideas a means not to escape from but to challenge patriarchy through exploring how to bring about change within the symbolic. They interpret his work as showing how culture works on the psyche so that the psyche is formed within patriarchy. In this perspective, Lacan does not say that woman should wish to be the phallus and hence desired by men, but that in modern Western societies this is the position women have to adopt in order to be women. In other words, Lacan offers a diagnosis of the reasons for women’s subservient, second-class position in modern Western cultures.
A third interpretation: Laughing (hysterically) at the penis/phallus
There are thus two diametrically opposed interpretations of Seminar XX: the first regards Seminar XX as perpetuating misogyny through reading woman as the other; the second regards it as explaining how and why Woman (in the symbolic) is rendered other. Our own position is one that sees these interpretations as different avenues to developing ways of thinking that disrupt the symbolic from within, and also as pointing the way towards further, informative readings. To that end, we will offer our own reading of Seminar XX. We do so not to propose an (impossible) one, true interpretation but rather to demonstrate how contradictions, slippages and discontinuities present in Lacan’s writings defy the idea of a singular analysis while opening possibilities for using Lacan for political action.
In the lecture, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Lacan states that the phallus ‘is the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole’ (Lacan, 2006: 579). Why then choose the phallus, and not another term such as, for example, power? Indeed, in emphasizing the importance of language in a lecture that defines the phallus, would not Lacan have been very careful in choosing a term traditionally so closely related to the penis? The answer is in the affirmative, because he acknowledges this relationship, emphasizing that the phallus is not a fantasy, nor an object and ‘[s]till less is it the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes’ (p. 579). His choice of the word ‘phallus’, we suggest, challenges through opening to ridicule masculinity’s desire to build the world, and thus organizations, in its own image.
In saying this, we are not claiming that we understand Lacan’s work better than other readers before us; rather, we follow the precedent of feminist and other theorists who acknowledge that each reading constitutes an interpretation. We highlight some aspects of the writings which may have been previously overlooked. Nor are we ignoring the legacy of violence and subjugation the symbol of the phallus, (often equated with the penis), has evoked and enabled in organizations, but instead seek to undermine its potency through laughter.
Our interpretation begins by noting a humour, often scathing, in Lacan’s seminars, a humour absent in most interpretations of his work. As we read closely recent translations of Lacan’s work (Lacan, 2007), we were struck by contradictions, suspense and comic aspects in his references to the phallus. Lacan’s lectures are sprinkled with caustic jokes and he often laughs at the ambitions of men to be men. This makes possible our interpretation that Lacan’s use of the term ‘phallus’ to represent the master signifier is a joke at masculinity’s expense, one that begins to seek change in the symbolic.
For example, in Seminar XX he writes: ‘There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. … Despite—I won’t say their phallus—despite what encumbers them that goes by that name ….’ (Lacan, 1998a: 76). Earlier, the sentence containing the infamous statement that woman ‘does not exist’ begins with a reference to ‘one of those beings qua sexed, to man insofar as he is endowed with the organ said to be phallic—I said, “said to be” ….’ (p. 72). Further, ‘man’ is ‘he who happens to be male without knowing what to do with it’ (Lacan, 1998a: 72). These little asides are meaningful; they show a way in which to read Lacan’s theory of the phallus as a pricking of an inflated masculinity. The penis, the organ that symbolizes the difference between masculinity and femininity, upon which the assertion of the superiority of masculinity and its accompanying organizational forms (valorization of masculine forms of representation, gendered speech and asymmetries of power) are based, is nothing but a rather sensitive body part whose claims are, as it were, over-inflated and in need of under-mining.
Hence the penis, in Lacan’s thesis, becomes a misplaced metaphor. He observes that ‘the Ancients’ used the phallus as a simulacrum, so patriarchal culture has for millennia elevated to a ‘superordinate status the penis, through the power of its metaphorical and metonymical relations to the phallus’ (Lacan, 2006: 579). It is this conflation, this ambition for the one to be a metaphor of the other, that we (like Lacan?) are laughing at. Through laughter it is possible to counteract exclusionary workplace practices, because the subversive character of laughter in organizations (Westwood, 2004) highlights the contested and ambiguous nature of overly-ambitious symbolization. Jokes contest organizational power relations (Dwyer, 1991) and facilitate resistance (Gabriel, 1995; Learmonth, 2009). They sidestep the problems of a feminist politics of defiance, which requires that women speak in response to the male and thus are prevented from finding their own voice (Moi, 1999). Indeed, for Lacan (2006: 582), the ‘ideal or typical manifestations of each of the sexes’ behaviour, including the act of copulation itself’ is comedic. Derrida, in more sombre mood, (Derrida and Wills, 2002) has argued similarly that the penis is nothing but a piece of flesh, carrying connotations not of grandeur but of shame. Derrida shows how ludicrous is its (the penis’s) ambition to be a phallus, a master signifier, and like Lacan, he has given us a language by which we can attack, with a million little pricks perhaps, the phallogocentrism of organizations. Through laughing at the vainglory of the penis’s pretensions to be the determinant of speech, we can therefore challenge and perhaps undo the power of masculinity through changing the terms in the symbolic through which the penis/phallus coupling is made: rather than a symbol of power, the penis/phallus becomes a symbol of an era of masculine domination that has now passed.
The laughter will not disguise or cover the pain of being a gendered subject but may reveal it more sharply. To be a subordinator (male speaking subject) or subordinated (female speaking subject) is to be in an impossible, compulsory, tormented position (see Copjec, 2004), although the political and social implications resulting from these two positions are drastically different. It is these implications that can be undone through laughter as much as through other strategies. So, in our reading Lacan laughs at the penis and claims to a super-powerful status by/on behalf of those whose body features one.
We also wish to use this laughter to bring about change in the gendered, organizational symbolic. To achieve this we must turn Lacanian theory on ourselves as organization theorists so as to disrupt the discourse of ‘the master’, a position we often occupy as academic theorists, female and male, as we see below when we analyse our position using the Four Discourses, outlined in Seminar XVII.
Discussion
This article originated in our frustration at being treated as inferior objects on the basis of our gendered identities (Katila and Meriläinen, 2002; Van den Brink and Benschop, forthcoming), a misogyny by exclusion we saw replicated in Lacanian inspired works about organizations. We showed, firstly, that Lacanian inspired theorizing could perpetuate a practice long ago decried by feminist theorists, that of presuming that the masculine represents all subjects so that the female is not only silenced but subordinated and denigrated for not achieving the male norm (Alcoff, 1996). We argued that this is particularly problematic when utilizing Lacanian theory, in which gender and sexuation are fundamental.
We then outlined the positions from which readings of Lacan’s theses informed by gender have taken place:
that discussed and criticized in the beginning of the article, which ignores gender/the phallus: this is currently the dominant position in Lacanian OMT, and we suggest it carries the danger of perpetuating exclusionary politics in academia;
two contrasting feminist readings of Lacan and the phallus, which together offer a means of furthering a feminist agenda in organizations and in academia, because they show how easy it is to use Lacan to exclude women, but also how we could use Lacan to better understand gendered relationships in organizations; and
our own interpretation, in which we suggest challenging masculinity’s claims to dominance through laughing at its attempts to equate the penis with the phallus. This new interpretation offers a practical politics: it seeks to undermine the symbolic order through laughing at that which seems to keep that very order in place.
But we have also been critical of Lacanian OMT’s reluctance to turn a Lacanian lens back on its own desires (and fears), so it behoves us now as feminist critical scholars to turn a Lacanian lens back upon our own endeavours. This reflexive turn is not a mere attempt at a ‘ceremonial purpose of legitimation’ (Alvesson et al., 2008: 498), nor an end in itself (Weick, 2002); even though reflexivity has become ‘the hallmark of contemporary work in organization studies’ (Clegg and Hardy, 2006, in Rhodes, 2009: 653). Here it is used as a method of developing theory and political practice through exploring answers to such uncomfortable questions as: In our attempt to propose gender sensitive readings ‘true’ to Lacan have we not ourselves tried to wrest ‘the phallus’ from Lacanian-inspired works in management and organizational theory that have ignored gender? Have we not tried to suggest a ‘correct’ reading, albeit one which argues that Lacanian ideas can be used to both misogynist and feminist ends? Lacan warns against such use of the phallic function of his name. When interpreting Lacan we should not seek to occupy the position of the Law, the big Other (Copjec, 2004), a position in which we desire to dictate the terms of what can exist within the symbolic domain, and is perhaps the position we might have inevitably fallen for as we offered our arguments in this article.
Yet even as we used intellectual arguments about the necessity of taking account of gender and sexuality central to Lacan’s work to further our understanding of organizations, we should not neglect the affective dimension that influenced the writing of this article. In other words, in exploring what may be our desire and where may be our lack within these carefully-crafted articles that speak about others’ lack and desire, we may point towards an understanding of the fallibilities of even the most politically-focused academics. Thus, in troubling the keenness with which we, like many others, turn Lacan’s ideas to understanding the workings of other’s unconscious but rarely turn them upon critically-oriented Lacanian organizational theory itself, we may also learn something more about critical scholarship and why such a progressive sub-discipline as critical management studies (Fournier and Grey, 2000) can perpetuate some of those very things of which it is most critical: sexist, exclusionary, if not exploitative practices (Bell and King, 2010; Tatli, forthcoming).
In undertaking a reflexive analysis we need to remain true to the theoretical trajectory of this article. Current models of reflexivity, although they may include a psychodynamic approach (Finlay, 2002; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000) do not draw specifically upon Lacanian theory. However, Lacan offers a model for reflexive thought, in Seminar XVII, that provides ways of challenging the homogeneous identity of the reflecting subject (the singular, academic I), by showing how subjects move between different modes of thought and speech. The subject who reflects is thus encouraged to ponder which version of the ‘I‘ is casting a reflexive lens upon its work. We look not only at how our subjectivities contribute to knowledge generating processes (see Hassard, 1994 for examples), but at how our research itself is a desirous process, driven by the fantasy of attaining a whole and complete truth which cannot be attained, and during which we will sometimes (often?) go spiralling into the discourse of the master. This will lead us to suggest the value of such a model for CMS and for Lacanian OMT, because it can alert us to ways in which we may unknowingly contradict our stated aims and purpose of emancipating various categories of disenfranchized ‘others’ through (inevitable) slippages into the position of the master.
A Lacanian model of reflexivity: four discourses that inform thinking, speaking and acting in academe
In Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan (2007) outlines the schemata of four discourses constitutive of the social order: the university, master, hysteric and analyst. These produce the four fundamental social effects of educating/indoctrinating; governing/brainwashing; desiring/protesting and analysing/revolutionizing (Bracher, 1994). We will suggest that critical management scholars seek to occupy the place of the hysteric, but because speaking subjects move among all four discourses (Driver, 2011, personal communication) a reflexive awareness of when and how we assume the positions of master, university or (failed) analyst may assist the stated goals of the CMS project of challenging oppression and exploitation. 3 A useful summary of Lacan’s four discourses for OMT is given by Sköld (2010), so rather than repeat what Sköld has written, we will focus instead on describing each of the discourses, and locating our own arguments within them.
The discourse of the university is a tyrannical and totalizing power which limits individual’s thinking, desiring and acting in ways that perpetuate the existing social order. It is grounded in master signifiers such as, notably, science, and the individualized ‘I’ that was central in modernity. Lacan denounces the fantasy of the scientific subject who discovers and possesses knowledge from the position of exteriority: ‘its pretension of having a thinking being, a subject, as its production. As subject, in its production, there is no question of it being able to see itself for a single instant as the master of knowledge’ (Lacan, 2007: 174). Lacan was clear about the specific status of the cause of desire of the scientist: ‘psychoanalysis is operating onto the subject of science, goes into the central lack where the subject tests itself as a desire’ (Lacan, 1998b). But this cause, he suggested, is foreclosed from scientific discourse, i.e. the scientist cannot know what is his/her desire, but although it cannot be articulated it haunts what it is that scientists seek. Lacan does not say much about the discourse of the university specifically, perhaps because the university’s power to dictate what is accepted as knowledge is not in need of explication. However, he states (Lacan, 2007: 148) that the university has ‘an extremely precise function’ which is to elucidate the master’s discourse, a statement that, as we will see, must cause us as academics, to pause.
The discourse of the master is a normative discourse which seeks to enact the autonomous, self-identical ego of modernity, i.e. the self as an island requiring no interactions with others in order to have identity (Bracher, 1994: 117). Closely related to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic (Lacan, 2007: 212), this discourse recognizes various super signifiers that guide every aspect of life, from the most intimate to the social and political agendas of the public realm. For example, ‘work’ and ‘science’ are master signifiers so powerful they cannot be challenged, just as is the notion of the individual with retrievable and finite identity. Similarly, notions of such things as an ‘I’ that is definable, or the truth of science, are but fantasies sparking the desire which belongs in the realm of the imaginary. Such certainties of finitude are exclusionary as they are meant to re-produce (new) discourses of the Same of what has gone before, thus perpetuating that patriarchy decried by many feminists. In many instances such fantasies underpin societal projects (Fotaki, 2009), often giving rise to alienating constructs such as power distributions based on race, gender and/or sexuality.
Thus there is something uncomfortable for us in the writing of this article: through arguing that Lacanian OMT should be informed by Lacan’s thesis on sexuation and gender, we find ourselves occupying the position of the master: this is how things should be done. But as feminist critical management theorists we have to make such arguments as we must continuously strive to identify what is repressed in the discourse of the master. Seminar XVII used as a mode for reflexivity therefore puts us as authors in a highly ambiguous position. We write within the discourse of the university and in so doing elucidate the discourse of the master, and we do this with the intention of bringing about changes in discourses and practices which subordinate women and other oppressed groups (see the domain statement of the CMS division in the Academy of Management for example). There is an obvious tension between institutionalization and the heterodox work CMS scholars are proclaiming to do (Parker and Thomas, 2011:420). We are critical of business schools’ aims and practices, yet we wish to be successful academics employed by business schools (Bell and King, 2010; Dunne et al., 2008; Grey, 2010). Further, in order to exist in the symbolic order of organizations individuals often subject themselves to societal norms, even if these are injurious to themselves (Kenny, 2010). So, to survive as academics, females within universities must often articulate the discourse of a master that dictates the subordinate status of women. The question is: how can we speak from this position without making a claim to new mastery? Indeed, is it possible to speak from this position without making a claim to new mastery?
There is some respite in Lacan’s third discourse, that of the hysteric, in which the subject refuses to take up the gendered positions available to her/him through language. This refusal is hysterical because it is articulated through a desire to take up those very subject positions it refuses—in the very act of writing this article and submitting it for review we demonstrate our wish to be accepted as (published) critical academics, at the same time as the article is critical on the grounds of misogyny of that very institution to which we wish to belong. In short, we like many other critical researchers, seek to challenge and undermine those very institutions which provide us with much that we desire: we want to remain outside but at the same time wish to be inside. We are not alone here: is this not the position of CMS scholars, that is, who deride that which we wish to be a part of? This is the position of the hysteric, in which hysteria is not a pathological condition but an intrinsic aspect of the (critical) academic endeavour we embrace. What we argue is that business schools need hysterics 4 because hysterics undertake the very necessary task of constantly questioning and redefining their purpose. Business schools, without such critical reflexivity as arises from the hysterical position, can help perpetuate societal injustices (through their support of capitalism and their endeavours to make it ever more abstractly efficient), and also blind themselves to the errors built into their ways of operating. For example, responsibility for the global financial recession of the early 20th century has been laid at the doors of business schools which preached the value of profit over and above everything else. Furthermore, critical scholars who work inside business schools, and who highlight ways in which their employing organizations put both themselves and the broader culture in danger, occupy the position of the hysteric, and so we suggest the value of making this position self-conscious and thus overtly political. To claim the name of hysteric is to use a politics that reverses a discourse, that is, it claims a disavowed name and uses it, powerfully, for political protest. A business school hysteric, proudly proclaiming that title, would constantly nag away at his/her employer’s intent, requiring of them that they articulate and analyse it. In exposing business school objectives and ideologies to the light of day, this reversed discourse, that of the hysteric, prevents business schools from contributing to forces that damage and destroy.
Although traditionally associated with female speaking subjects the discourse of the hysteric is available to male and female speaking subjects alike. Indeed, Jane Gallop argues that Freud links hysteria to bisexuality, not as defined through object of sexual desire but through identification: the hysteric identifies with members of both sexes and cannot choose sexual identity (Gallop, 1983 quoted in Gilman et al., 1993). In this way, the discourse of the hysteric allows us to strive to undo and see our arguments from the outside of our own gender and identity, hence we argue for conceptual and empathetic (hysterical) bisexuality, and a knowing and unashamed adoption of the hysterical position for a CMS and critical scholarship that already, perhaps unawares, is hysterical. This leads to possibilities of a new politics aimed at changes in the symbolic, because it is the hysteric’s discourse that can unsettle the master’s discourse. And it gives cause for hope, because identifying, articulating and representing what has been suppressed and repressed can change the social structure (Bracher, 1994). As hysterical (academics) we have to strive to identify what is repressed in the discourse of the master, while we monitor judiciously and relentlessly our own proclamations and attempts at mastery. It is inevitable that we will sometimes speak through the discourses of the master and university, even though they contradict what drives us to speak at other times through the discourse of the hysteric.
There is one further discourse that would seem to offer a more conducive position, but which we should not aspire to occupy. This is the discourse of the analyst, which provides the only effective means for overcoming the tyrannies and deceptions imposed through the illusions of mastery and language because it allows subjects themselves to appreciate the inconsistency and potentiality of their identity, rather than being limited to those imposed from the outside. The discourse of the analyst can do this because of its opposition to all will of mastery, and its refusal to conform to meaning or closure. It does so through putting in a dominant position that which has been excluded from symbolization, which is, by definition, unsayable, left out, repressed. Knowledge, in this discourse, is not absolute and logical, but is mythic and unconscious. The analyst identifies disjointed or contradictory discourses (in an organization) and so identifies unconscious fantasies and causes of desire hidden behind the master signifiers. However even the analyst is not free from the illusions of the imaginary, which are an intrinsic aspect of the psyche. The analyst may therefore speak as the master, the university or the hysteric. Still, for academics to claim to occupy the discourse of the analyst would be to act as subjects supposed to know: that would imply entertaining the fantasy that finite knowledge is attainable and thus that we desire mastery. But we cannot free ourselves altogether from this fantasy underpinning our desire; it is only through observing such a tendency within ourselves and the ways it skews our writing that we can strive to abjure the positions of the master, the university or the analyst and so impede our articulations of them. This is highly pertinent for understanding ourselves as critical management scholars: we will sometimes too, speak through the discourses of the master and university, even though they contradict what drives us to speak at other times through the discourse of the hysteric.
The turns this article has taken illustrates this trajectory very well. In writing it we have, as Lacan shows we must, moved through at least three of the four discourses, even though the only tenable position we can occupy as critical theorists is that of the hysteric. We moved into the position of the master/university through arguing for different ways of reading Lacan, writing the arguments in the form of a article to be submitted to a journal. But we are cognizant that the discourse of the master can bring about no more than ‘a revolution’ that would replace one tyranny with another (Lacan, 2007). If all Lacanian-inspired articles were in future to be judged according to their use of Seminar XX, then we would have replaced one overly-narrow reading of Lacan with another discourse of the master. By interrogating ourselves and the writing of this article through using Lacan’s Seminar XVII we found that in some ways we might unwittingly aspire to become that to which we are averse: voices of authority dictating what can be regarded as knowledge, and thus inevitably failing to bring about deeply-desired changes towards a more egalitarian, emancipatory and less misogynistic academy.
Our reading of the phallus and recommendation of a politics that would unsettle the symbolic organizational order through laughing at the penis/phallus conjunction, can now be seen as a hysterical reading offering an excessive and parodic practice for unsettling the discourse of the master. As we have noted already, in laughing alongside Lacan, we are not aiming to contradict or even enrich the previously discussed interpretations, but to heighten awareness of how tentative and laboriously-achieved are our identities as female or male speaking subjects. Laughing (hysterically) at the penis/phallus conjunction and pointing at the comic and the precarious symbols upon which the paramount claims to power, authority and knowledge are being made is a political endeavour aimed at disrupting dominant organizational discourses. It is a tactic that many readers might at first find ridiculous, fanciful, and perhaps impotent. However, laughing from the position of the hysteric changes the ways in which we can think, and express how we feel, ultimately giving us power to undo organizational practices. The subversive power of laughter as (an imperfect) means of undoing oppressive structures or even counteracting the weight of history, has been a central theme in the works of writers and philosophers such as Milan Kundera, Umberto Ecco, Mikhail Bakhtin and Judith Butler to name but a few.
We have then argued that critical management scholarship has, from its inception, been located in the discourse of the hysteric but moves also through the discourses of master and university, if not the analyst, and thus they/we follow a trajectory Lacan says is inevitable. It is perhaps the slippage into a non-hysterical discourse of the master or university that allows the misogyny that inspired this article: critical management scholars who aim to counteract the oppression of others and promote justice in organizations and society can betray these aims in everyday practice if they slip into such discourses. Indeed, the abjuring of Lacan’s thesis of gender in Lacanian scholarship on organizations perhaps is a symptom of its clinging to the masculine power of the master. The discourse of the hysteric (and the laughter we advocate) punctures such fantasies of using Lacan to find answers. It is in the (reverse) discourse of the hysteric that possibilities for change can be found, i.e. not by proposing another ‘revolutionary’ theory but by questioning (and laughing at?) our very own assumptions and presuppositions as we utter them. Rather than seeking to create new master signifiers and/or regimes of truth, we should embrace consciously and methodically the position of the hysteric, and question, question and question again the discourse of the master without ever being satisfied with the answers. A Lacanian-inspired reflexivity can allow us to identify when the ceaseless questioning of the hysteric has been replaced with the dry and unproductive certainties and power of the master and prompt us to laughter. Therefore, if CMS and critical organization scholarship were to self-consciously embrace its hysterical stance it could monitor its/our inevitable time of speaking as masters. This act is facilitated by the uncomfortable form of reflexivity provided by Seminar XVII, which encourages us to do more than acknowledge how we have influenced the arguments, because we turn the arguments back on ourselves to question ourselves critically.
(In) conclusion
The aims of this article, at its outset, were to discover in Lacan’s writings ways of developing a politics of organizational gender through introducing Lacan’s thesis on feminine sexuality to organization and management theory, and to challenge the masculine significations and images that dominate our field. We did this through critiquing the absence of Lacan’s thesis on sexuation and gender from Lacanian theorizing taken up by critical management scholars. In order to counteract this, we introduced two very different feminist interpretations of Lacan’s oeuvre, and developed our own reading in which we recommended political action based on laughing at the aspiration of the penis to be the phallus, or master signifier. This reading anticipated what was to come later in the article: an advocacy of reversing the discourse of hysteria, through a self-conscious claiming of the position of the hysteric.
When we reflected upon our discussion using the schema offered by Lacan in Seminar XVII, we found that we too conformed in many ways with the masculine practices we were seeking to challenge. In speaking through the discourses of the master and university we located ourselves as masculine speaking subjects, and thus in positions contradicting our aims for a gendered politics of organizational change. Indeed, Lacan shows that subjects can move between masculine and feminine positions, regardless of their biology. Women in academia have entered a male world and in order to find acceptance have had to learn how to position themselves as masculine speaking subjects. It was when we could locate ourselves in the (female) discourse of the hysteric that we approximated more closely our desired objectives.
Here, as female speaking subjects, we found a practice that could in some ways unsettle the symbolic and slowly bring about new organizational practices that are derogatory and/or denigrating neither to female nor male speaking subjects. This led us to advocate a self-consciously hysterical critical management scholarship inspired by Lacan’s work in which scholars think, speak and act as bisexual speaking subjects. This does not mean a metaphorical cross-dressing, nor that we choose a sexual identity, but that we become aware of how we move between male- (the discourse of the master) and female- (the discourse of the hysteric) speaking subject positions. There are men as well as women (some of them are critters, some of them not) who adopt a feminist stance in their writings and practices in academia. In other words, male and female speaking subjects alike adopting a critical management stance are located within the feminine discourse of the hysteric but, at times inevitably move through the masculine discourses of the master and university. The hysterical critical theory of management and organizations that we argue for would involve all masculine speaking subjects learning how to become female speaking subjects, a position that is unknown because it has been largely absent from the symbolic body of (both critical and mainstream organizational theory) knowledge. From such a position the gender politics of laughing (hysterically) at the conflation of male anatomy (the penis), with the fantasy of possessing the power of the phallus, as proposed in this article, can be practised by male and female speaking subjects together. That all scholars move between male and female speaking positions means this is a politics whereby men and women alike become bisexual, both conceptually and emphatically.
We advocate naming critical management studies (CMS) as a hysterical discipline, one that reflects upon itself using such a lens as Lacan’s Seminar XVII to ask uncomfortable questions of it/ourselves. Lacan urges us to make the knowledge within the hysteric’s discourse explicit, because then we may do something with it. A self-consciously hysterical CMS would forego certainty, abjure closure, and rather live and work with a mosaic of contradictory, complementary, clashing or incomplete conclusions. As hysterical critical scholars we would be involved in analysing our own organization, academia, and the ways in which it has enthralled us in its/our desire for mastery. But such considerations should not be limited to the subfield of management studies defined as CMS, but to a critical stance present in critical social theory, sociology and social science more generally(Parker and Thomas, 2011).
If Lacanian organization and management theory were to operate from such a hysterical position, then rather than diagnosing desire and lack in others, it may become possible to explore our own passions, lack and fallibility and through such elaborations seek to bring about changes in the symbolic. A hysterical CMS would have extraordinarily difficult questions to explore. It would also require reassessment of our interactions with students. How and what can we teach if we attempt to abjure the discourses of the University and the Master? Critical management modules are not exempt from claims that they impose a ‘truth’ upon students (Ford et al., 2010), but if we are not imposing our mastery how then can we teach? And how then can we engage with organizations?
There is a danger of a split between male and female speaking scholarly subjects such that, rather than collective critical endeavour, female-speaking subjects adopt a hysterical position but male-speaking scholars refuse to join this critical Greek chorus. If so, not only would this reconfirm the status quo and its derogatory association of hysteria with female madness, it would undermine and eventually destroy CMS through its slicing off of the ‘critical’ in its title. A politics of the hysteric therefore demands a collective commitment between male- and female-speaking subjects, regardless of where they are positioned in the gender continuum. It obligates us as academics and critical scholars to use those tools to detect and question exclusionary logics and practices whenever they occur, inside and outside of academia. Only then may we hope to bring about changes in the symbolic order that improve lives in organizations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers of this paper, associate editor Prof. Linda Smircich and Editor-in-Chief, Professor Martin Parker whose support and advice was exemplary and markedly improved the ideas in the paper. Any remaining flaws are, of course, our own fault.