Abstract
It is a well established tradition to use psychoanalysis to study organizations. But it is only recently (in the last ten years) that researchers have started using Lacan’s works and some of the key concepts he developed in his oeuvre, in their reflections on the subject. Many recent publications and a special issue of Organization (2010) have marked the growing importance of this author for studying and understanding organizations. It is as part of this desire to give Lacan’s work serious consideration in organization studies that one should approach this book—edited by Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers, and written by researchers who for the most part have already demonstrated their commitment to exploiting Lacan’s concepts in this field.
What is striking about this book—and clearly indicates the contribution of the Lacanian perspective and what distinguishes it from other approaches that use psychoanalysis to examine organizations—is that it shows how important a resource it is in critical socio-political theory. The Lacanian theory serves to support the authors’ ethical and political (critical) stance, from which they explore the institutional and organizational aspects of social life and attempt to understand in what way different modalities of the subject within the organization co-relate to specific hegemonic organizational practices. It is, first of all, Lacan’s definition of the unconscious as ‘the Other’s discourse’ and of subjectivity as ‘external’ to the subject, in relation to the theory of discourse, that helps to overcome some of the internalizing and individualizing tendencies psychoanalysis is commonly criticized for and which have diminished its critical scope. Another basis common to several texts proposed here is Lacan’s fight against ego-psychology, and his rejection of psychologism and of any form of ‘human engineering’. Lacan’s ethical and scientific positioning is very useful for a critical approach to the central place given, in contemporary management, to work psychology, coaching, self improvement techniques or to the ideology of happiness, in order to make employees more efficient at work.
In so far as several of this book’s authors have been influenced in their reading of Lacan’s works by philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the main Lacanian-Žižekian categories are used extensively, particularly those—inter-related—of the ‘Other’, ‘fantasy’, ‘lack’, ‘desire’, ‘jouissance’ and of ‘superegoic command to enjoy’. Thus, Glynos undertakes a meticulous examination of the category of fantasy in relation to organization, and reveals the similarities as well as the differences, in this regard, between the Klein/Bion approach and Lacan’s. He shows that fantasies play a crucial role in sustaining workplace practices generally, but also in sustaining relations of exploitation and domination, and highlights the advantage of using Lacan’s theory in order to make the political and normative significance of fantasy clearer. Stavrakakis also explores this path by precisely articulating the links between fantasy, symbolic order, jouissance and obedience to authority. His analysis highlights the role of the fantasy which, by providing an explanation for the loss of jouissance inherent to the entry of the subject in the symbolic order, conceals the inconsistency of the Symbolic, sustains the credibility of the organized Other and, in so doing, makes the symbolic command of the Law performative. This approach helps better understand one crucial question: why do some commands produce obedient behaviour while others are ignored?
Generally, what the authors of this book are interested in are the subtle forms of power: (1) those that require the subjective complicity of the subject and thus become more difficult to fight; (2) those that are exercised less through the traditional authority than through the command to enjoy, more in keeping with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999) and the ‘ideology of happiness at work’ (see the chapters by Cederström and Grassmann, or Owens); using Lacan’s work helps to measure to what extent this facet of the Other, which manifests through the superego order and the ferocious imperative of jouissance, is present in contemporary organizations; (3) those, finally, which are all the more difficult to identify because they come in the form of disobedience and even resistance. On this particular point, the contribution of Lacan’s theory is particularly obvious: the latter helps to identify the forms of transgression, which, despite their appearance, actually contribute to reinforcing the dominant order by producing what Žižek calls ‘spaces of false disidentification’. The ‘decaf resistance’ Contu talks about in her work (2008) goes hand-in-hand with a figure discussed throughout this book: that of the cynic who believes himself to have complete knowledge of the Other, knows that the Other sucks, looks disdainfully at the ambient ideology, while behaving like a perfectly obedient subject.
This paroxysmal figure of the cynic clearly shows that one does not need to believe in order to act: ‘cynical distance is just one way to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy; even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them’ (Žižek, 1989: 32). Quite appropriately, Fleming repositions the Cynic in the broader context of the ‘displaced ideological subject’. This displacement occurs from the subject’s beliefs to the subject’s practice: never mind the beliefs, it is through actions, practices and objects that subjects identify with the commands of authority. In the second type of displacement described by Fleming, the labour of belief is transferred onto supposed others: even if these believing others might not even exist, it is enough to presuppose that there are others who will believe for us in our place. This approach to ideological displacement or transference is highly relevant for understanding the insidious and paradoxical ways through which power and control are exercised in contemporary organizations where dis-identification, critique and anti-hierarchical coolness are encouraged.
Based on clinical observations, Owens enables us to approach from a somewhat different angle the question of how the subject relates to the organized Other. As a practising analyst and clinician, she witnesses a virtualization of reality in the workplace re-fashioned as a virtual location where the Other is ‘deprived of its Otherness’, so to speak. ‘In place of the Che vuoi? as the driving force behind the trajectory of desire, there is a Chi vuoi?, as nowadays it is not so clear that there is an Other who wants something from you’ (Owens, p. 205). This absence of Otherness comes with a new clinic of symptoms whereby subjects seem to experience an unbearable lightness of ‘being’ and where anxiety is replaced by subjective disarray. These observations are of great interest: while the subjective destitution related to the fall of the Other may be one desirable outcome of the end of analysis, the fact that the Other is, from the start, revealed to be lacking and inconsistent in contemporary workplaces, makes the subjects’ emancipation impossible and leads them, instead, into new forms of pathologies. The subtlety of Lacan’s theory lies in its reminding us that alienation is the primary condition for separation.
Though the Lacanian-Žižekian approach is extensively used by authors to warn against any form of pseudo-subversive activity, it is seldom used to answer a central question raised by Fleming at the end of his chapter: ‘what would a mature resistance look like in this regard?’ (p. 181). The not sufficiently detailed answers offered to this question include: enrolling practices, objects and other in the radicalism instead of transferring them; fighting against the individualization of employees and reinforce solidarity by recruiting others to join a counter organization of resistance; exiting the organization or never entering it in the first place; or, on the contrary, ‘believing too much’, strictly adhering to the principles contained in culture management.
Yet, Lacan’s work can also help to explore ways of creating a non reproductive resistance. As mentioned above, the issue of jouissance is central to how the subject relates to the organization—in which it is made into an imperative. Therefore, isn’t one central question, from the point of view of resistance, that of finding out how to deactivate jouissance? This is where psychoanalysis, with the insight it provides into the question of jouissance and into how it articulates into the psychic economy, can be helpful: the end of analysis is accompanied, not by a suppression of jouissance (the risk being to lapse into apathy), but by its devaluation. The issue, here, is to transform how the subject relates to jouissance so as to limit its role in the organization. This reflection on devaluating jouissance goes hand-in-hand with a reflection on the symptom. Psychoanalysis seeks in no way to eradicate it at all cost, but considers it as what shapes the subject, what makes him unique: it appears as a means—though sometimes dysfunctional and a source of suffering—for the subject to cope with his traumatic encounter with language and the question of jouissance. The purpose of psychoanalysis is not to eliminate the symptom but on the contrary to bring the subject to identify with his symptom, in return for transformation. Thus, though the symptom might pose a problem, it is also the solution, which requires a few alterations that will convert it into a ‘sinthome’ (Lacan, 2005). The idea here is for everyone to take up their symptom as their own particular one, the subject taking on her desire as coming from the Other, while detaching herself from the Other’s jouissance (which is also her own).
Furthermore, it must be highlighted that contrary to what is stated in the book’s introduction, Lacan himself did reflect on organization. The organization of his school was a constant subject of concern for him—and in relation to this, the question of power, transmission, of the possibility of maintaining the desire of those who were affiliated to it as well as psychoanalysis’ own requirement of truth. There is a desire in Lacan to think about the organizational consequences of the analytical discourse (Lacan, 1975) and to prevent institutionalization, and avoid its inherent risks of ‘deviations and compromises’ (Lacan, 2011: 317). Thus, his attempt to invent ‘the pass’ as a mechanism to select the ‘school’s analysts’, the theorization and the implementation of the ‘cartels’, the dissolution by Lacan himself in 1980 of his school, denote an extreme concern for the way in which an organization can function; namely, here, an organization which should not deviate from the purpose for which it was created, that is to say a Work … which, in the field that Freud opened, reinvests the cutting edge of its truth—which restores the original praxis that he instituted under the name of psychoanalysis to its responsibilities in our world … Objective that I maintain. That is why I am dissolving. (Lacan, 2001 : 317)