Work as the contemporary limit of life: Capitalism,the death drive,and the lethal fantasy of ‘work

Abstract

This article introduces contemporary discourses of ‘work–life balance’ as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood around employment and organizations. To do so, it draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian ‘death drive’ to highlight the importance of ‘disequilibrium’ for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossible pursuit of ‘equilibrium’ maps out onto present desires for ‘work–life balance’ and its subsequent production of a regulated ‘imbalanced’ subject. It argues that individuals are maintained as subjects through their identification with and paradoxical enjoyment, or jouissance, from being ‘imbalanced’. Consequently, capitalist work and organizations stand as the contemporary limit of ‘life’ through their fundamental role in producing and sustaining this ‘imbalanced’ subject in search of ‘balance’. It is ironically in this longing to overcome this ‘imbalance’, to ‘work to live’, that individuals remain even more strongly a capitalist and organizational ‘subject of desire’. They literally cannot go on subjectively ‘living’ without capitalist work.

Keywords

Control fantasy work–life balance

Introduction

The relationship between ‘work’ and ‘life’ remains central for any analysis of subjectivity generally and organizational identity particularly. The dominant treatment of these spheres as related but ultimately separate areas of an individuals’ existence is increasingly challenged—scholars stressing instead their integrative effect on broader perceptions of time (Kunda, 1992; Perlow, 1998; Cohen, 2010), identity (Casey, 1995), and even space (Fleming and Spicer, 2004). This is especially imperative given the current emphasis companies place on their employee’s personal wellbeing, evidenced in rising organizational values such as ‘work–life balance’ and ‘workplace spirituality’ (Burack, 1999; Byrne, 2005; Der Klerk, 2005; Mattson et al., 2000). While policy wise firms have become more attuned to their workforce’s non-economic needs involving family and lifestyle (Crompton and Lyonette, 2006; O’Brien and Hayden, 2008; Sheridan and Conway, 2001; Thompson, 2002), their use to enhance employee loyalty and productivity has not gone unnoticed within organizational literature (Alvesson, 2000; Caproni, 2004; Healy, 2004; Rego and Cunha, 2008; Scholarios and Marks, 2004). This strategic element opens the space for investigating the ways discourses of ‘work–life balance’ are presently shaping contemporary employee identity in support of firms and capitalist work.

Important to this examination is how this shift alters individual’s affective identification with organizations. The stated goal of many modern companies transcends profit motivations and instead aims to ensure the ‘increased physical and mental health of employees’ including their ‘advanced spiritual growth and enhanced sense of self-worth’ (Krahnke et al., 2003: 397). This value shift reflects evolving organizational expectations on the part of the workforce regarding the positive contribution companies can make to their overall psychological wellbeing (Howard, 2002; Neal et al., 1999; Waddock, 1999), with employee attachment more and more depending on their ability to ‘develop their complete self at work’ (Mitroff and Denton, 1999). To this end, notions of ‘work–life balance’ have transcended the specific policy prescriptions identified with family-friendly measures and become an admittedly ambiguous, but nonetheless prevailing set of organizational principles for defining employer–employee relations (Jones, 2003; Whittle, 2008). At stake is how these aspirations to achieve ‘balance’ represent a new form of organizational and capitalist identification.

This article explores this issue through a psychoanalytic perspective, in particular drawing upon the theories of Jacques Lacan for this purpose. It studies work–life balance as an affective discourse structuring contemporary self-hood. It builds, in this respect, upon existing literature linking subjectivity and identification to affective narratives (Humphrey and Brown, 2002; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003; Thornborrow and Brown, 2009). Individuals psychologically stabilize their identity in the struggle to realize an aspirational identity against perceived malicious forces (Bloom and Cederström, 2009; Rhodes and Bloom, 2012). More relevantly, it contributes to and expands on a recent set of literature that directly theoretically links the redrawing of work–life boundaries to contemporary employment fantasies (see Costas and Grey, 2014; Ekman, 2013; Muhr and Kirkegaard, 2013). This analysis draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian ‘death drive’ in order to highlight the importance of the role of ‘disequilibrium’ for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossible pursuit of ‘equilibrium’ maps out onto present desires for ‘work–life balance’ and its subsequent production of a regulated ‘imbalanced’ subject. It argues that individuals are maintained as subjects through their identification with and paradoxical enjoyment, or jouissance, from being ‘imbalanced’.

This essay investigates, hence, how ‘work’ and ‘life’ are being combined into a cultural fantasy that contributes to modern organizational and capitalist identity regulation. Worker loyalty is paradoxically no longer correlated to explicitly economic or organizational values (e.g. individualism, career advancement within a company, increasing the firm’s profit, and so on) but instead around the idyllic promise of achieving ‘work–life balance’. The Lacanian account of the death drive employed in this analysis offers a theoretical framework for explaining the affective appeal of discourses of ‘work–life balance’ and how they ironically contribute to the construction of a contemporary work subject. Imperative is the social construction of self-hood linked to the stabilizing but always disappointing desire for ‘balance’. Consequently, through this fantasy of balance, self-hood becomes once again inexorably bound to themes of capitalist work and organizations.

This article is structured as follows. It begins with a review of the organizational literature on ‘work–life balance’ and the critical need for an affective account of this discourse. This is followed by a theory section focusing on Jacque Lacan’s interpretation of the Freudian death drive, one stressing the precarious formation of the subject and fixation of identification around the impossibility of achieving ‘equilibrium’. Next, it uses this theoretical framework to illuminate how ‘work–life balance’ exists as a new capitalist fantasy for organizing the subject and identification. It will then explore how individuals gain an ironic enjoyment, or jouissance, from being ‘imbalanced’ and the ways this jouissance regulates their identity as a capitalist worker within present-day organizations. It concludes with a discussion of how discourses of balance reflect the way capitalist work and organizations increasingly stand as the subjective ‘limit’ for modern identity.

Balancing contemporary identity between work and life

Traditionally, the ability for individuals to separate their personal and professional selves was considered an important tenant of modern society (Blocklehurst, 2001; Grint, 1991; Mangham, 1995; Sennett, 2000). More critically, this dichotomization of the economic and social spheres was a significant part of the broader regulation of employees within the workplace. Quoting Kallinikos (2004) ‘in the social context of modernity, other organizations and institutions that are clearly and unambiguously differentiated from work organizations (for example, family and community) represent a crucial outlet for the individual’s interests and activities’ (p. 21). ‘Work’ and ‘life’ therefore became spheres that needed to be integrated and ‘balanced’ rather than merely kept separate. To this end, the so-called ‘modular man’—the view of subjects as the composite of their diverse socio-economic institutional roles—was seen to allow individuals to become adaptive and flexible to quickly changing institutional demands (Gellner, 1996; Kallinikos, 2003).

However, increasingly both scholars and the public are embracing the interdependent, synergetic, interaction between ‘work’ and ‘life’ (Charles and James, 2005). This new emphasis has led philosophically to notions of a ‘becoming ontology’, whereby the non-work and economic spheres combine to form the ‘social subject’ (Fletcher and Watson, 2007), dictating how one ‘is expected to behave and act within a specific community at a given point of time’ (Chia, 2003). This reflects a broader cultural shift stressing values of personal rather professional satisfaction. Jobs are increasingly expected to contribute to personal wellbeing (Howard, 2002; Mitroff and Denton, 1999; Neal et al., 1999; Waddock, 1999), as success is re-defined toward a more comprehensive desire for ‘personal fulfillment’ outside of work (Pedersen, 2011). Emerging is a novel conception of work and organizational life focusing on the ‘increased physical and mental health of employees’ including their ‘advanced spiritual growth and enhanced sense of self-worth’ (Krahnke et al., 2003: 397).

Key, in this regard, is the desire for realizing a proper ‘work–life balance’. Current employment models are challenging ‘basic assumptions about the ideal worker who is “unencumbered” by family or other non-work commitments’ (Kossek et al., 2010: 9; also see Kanter, 1977; Rapoport et al., 2002). Work–life balance constitutes a widespread, if not always fulfilled, demand both in industrialized societies and internationally (Kossek and Friede, 2006; Lewis et al., 2003; Lewis et al., 2007) which aims to ‘enhance organizational structural and cultural/relational support for work, family and personal life’ (Kossek et al., 2010: 4). It is argued that changing organizational norms to better achieve this balance is mutually beneficial to both employees and employers (Byrne, 2005), a position reinforced by government policies committed to improving workers psychological welfare by facilitating a more ‘balanced’ professional experience allowing ample ‘time for hobbies, leisure activities, or to maintain friendships and extended family relationships’ (Dex and Bond, 2005).

Yet, work–life balance discourses have also become an increasing target for scholarly critiques. According to Fleetwood (2007), it is an example of a ‘neo-liberal’ capitalism ‘whereby the iron fist of a new ruling class is wrapped in the velvet glove of freedom, individualism and above all flexibility’ (p. 388). Here, values of flexibility are ‘discursively rehabilitated’ to support employer friendly rather than employee friendly policies (Fleetwood, 2007: 388). Work–life balance exists then as a strategic response to the changing nature of work associated with neo-liberalism, focusing the public discourse away from broader systematic problems linked to capitalism. As such,

the WLB approach to framing the current debate has led to quick-fix solutions, such as flexible working policies that are often of limited effectiveness because they do not question assumptions about the gendered nature of work or the constraints to individual choice. (Lewis et al., 2007: 369)

These perspectives resonate with recent critical accounts of ‘work–life balance’ (see especially Gatrell and Cooper, 2008; Lewis, 2003; Warhurst et al., 2008). In particular, this discourse tends to accept and, therefore, reinforce established capitalist and quite managerialist assumptions about what constitutes work, on the one hand, and what is the appropriate relationship between ‘work’ and ‘life’, on the other. As Eikhof et al. (2007) suggest,

In the work-life balance debate, over-work is perceived as the problem. Nevertheless, beyond working time and the provision of flexible working practices to enable child care, there is little in the debate but the need to change work per se. The debate also narrowly perceives ‘life’, equating it with women’s care work, hence the emphasis again of family-friendly polices. (p. 325)

Significantly, appeals to become more ‘balanced’ serve, progressively, to regulate the identity of managers and employees alike. Ford and Collinson’s (2011) study of public service managers reveal that ‘ … in practice work-life balance initiatives may only serve to increase managerial anxieties and pressures, the very opposite outcome to that intended’ (p. 257).

Nevertheless, conspicuously under investigated in these critiques is how identity is being critically regulated by these strategic discourses of balance. Critical management studies significantly focus on the ‘mutual contamination’ work and life discourses have for each other. Alvesson and Willmott (2002), for instance, argue that social identities can be used to resist suturing organizational ideologies. By contrast, scholars such as Watson (2008) have documented the ways organizational identities can shape one’s behavior outside of work. A potentially positive intervention in this direction is organizational literature highlighting the blurring of ‘work’ and ‘life’ within the post-industrial context regarding individual perceptions of time (Kunda, 1992; Perlow, 1998) and identity (Barker, 1993; Casey, 1995).

These critical analyses permit for a deeper examination of the role of ‘work–life balance’ discourses for shaping contemporary work identity. Meriläinen et al. (2004) present ‘work–life balance’ as a socialized discourse that organizes identity around negotiating professional and personal obligations, often leading depending on context, to work addiction. At stake, however, is studying not only ‘how’ work–life balance discourses and initiatives are creating outcomes counter to their stated intention, but also ‘why’. To do so, requires a more thoroughgoing engagement with the affective appeal of these discourse and the critical implications of this affect. The psychoanalytic theories of Lacan are especially useful for such an investigation—as they link the social construction of the subject and identification to affective cultural and organizational discourses. To this end, scholars have recently associated present-day workplace identities with affective discourses that reflect and to certain contribute to this reconfiguration of professional and personal boundaries. In this vein, Ekman (2013) as well as Costas and Grey (2014) connect this changing relation of work and life to fantasies of limitless potential and an ideal future self, respectively. These studies gesture toward how the Lacanian concept of fantasy and his interpretation of the Freudian death drive provide a potentially crucial theoretical framework for exploring ‘work–life balance’ as an affective discourse that paradoxically revolves identity around capitalist work and organizations.

Lacan, the death drive, and the ‘Lethal Life’ of the subject

This article connects up present discourses of work–life balance to psychoanalytic processes of seeking ‘equilibrium’. Key, in this regard, is the impossibility of ever achieving such equilibrium and therefore the primacy of the death drive to explain this persistent state of ‘disequilibrium’. Looking specifically at Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s original theory of the death drive, crucial is the construction of the subject and revolving of identification around this condition of ‘disequilibrium’. Revealed, fundamentally, as will be shown, is the importance of the death drive, and the jouissance individuals gain from it, for temporarily securing their self-hood as an ‘imbalanced’ subject.

Freud initially saw individuals as organized unconsciously around the pleasure found in the ‘equilibrium’ of psychic forces. Yet, this view was continually undercut by the consistent and repeated presence of non-pleasurable disequilibrium, which he attributed to a type of fundamental ‘masochism’ associated with humans. To account for this phenomenon, Freud invented the concept of the death drive. Quoting Freud (1937) at length, in this respect:

If we bear in mind the whole picture made up of the phenomena of the masochism inherent in so many people … we shall have to abandon the belief that psychic processes are governed exclusively by the striving after pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the existence of a power in psychic life which, according to its aim, we call the instinct of aggression or destruction and which we derive from the primal death-instinct of animate matter. (pp. 396–97)

To this end, he refocused his theory on what he viewed as the inherently self-destructive drive of individuals, premised on aggression and resulting in disequilibrium. He maintained that the ‘life’ or ‘eros’ drive and the death drive were necessary and inexorably related components in the formation of the self, arguing that

it is not a question of an optimistic as opposed to a pessimistic theory of life. Only by the interaction and counteraction of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death-instinct, never by one or the other alone, can the motley variety of vital phenomena be explained. (Freud, 1937: 397)

While Freud’s theory of the death drive was subject to much skepticism, Lacan saw it as a central principle for his psychoanalytic theory. For Freud (1987), the death drive represented the natural tendency individuals have to return ‘back into the inanimate state’ (p. 380). Merely explaining this concept further, Lacan associates the death drive to the symbolic death of the subject. Similar to Freud, he emphasizes the death drive in relation to the necessary but impossible desire for equilibrium as a subject. Yet unlike Freud, he locates this process, at least in his earliest discussions on the topic, in the simultaneous wish to become a ‘whole’ subject within the symbolic order of language and the fundamental impossibility of ever being able to do so. In his words, ‘The death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order … the symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be … it is a symbolic order in travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realized’ (Lacan, 1988: 326).

Lacan (2014) links the death drive, as such, to a type of clinging to fixity to avoid the void at the center of the relation of the language, being or body. Here, it is loss itself that is positive, as it allows individuals to continually invest in a socially provided self, even if this self is necessarily always incomplete. Importantly, these life and death drives are not instinctual or biological. Rather they represent the unconscious production of the subject from the inherent meaningless, or ‘non-sense’, of linguistic relations. It is the belief that there is an equilibrium that allows for the subject to ironically emerge and identification to persist. According to Lacan (2001) in ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power’, Freud ‘questioned life according to its meaning and not to say that it has none … but to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death’ (p. 536). Later, he similarly avers that ‘the function of desire must remain in fundamental relation with death’ (Lacan, 1992: 303; also in Boothby, 2014: 14).

For this reason, it can be said that from a Lacanian perspective, the life and death drive exist in a dialectical and paradoxical relationship. It is dialectical in so much that the subject and identification emerge in the continual synthesis of the life and death drive. It is a type of ‘lethal life’ in that all attempts to experience life as a permanently fixed subject necessarily lead to disappointment and a re-encounter with the loss of this fixity and, therefore, the ‘real’ of existence. In the words of Ragland (2013), ‘Thus it is loss that drives life, making of the death drive a matter of clinging to known consistencies rather than encountering the unbearable real of loss …’ (p. 87). However, it is also paradoxical in so much that just as the life drive leads always to death; it is through the death drive that individuals continually invest in life.

Underpinning this dialectical and paradoxical construction of the subject and identification is the enjoyment, or jouissance, individuals receive associated with the death drive. A key advancement of Lacan on Freud is that individual’s gain an acute enjoyment attached to their disequilibrium. This enjoyment contrasts with pleasure, in that it is not an unmediated encounter with ‘equilibrium’ but rather the affective jouissance they garner in the (im)possibility of obtaining this unity permanently rather merely temporarily. It is important, in this respect, to distinguish between jouissance and pleasure. Individuals do not consciously experience jouissance as pleasure but rather as the paradoxical enjoyment they gain from their suffering as desiring subjects. As Evans (1996) explains,

Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls jouissance, ‘jouissance is suffering’ (S7, 184). The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction (Freud’s ‘primary gain from illness’). The prohibition of jouissance (the pleasure principle) is inherent in the symbolic structure of language, which is why ‘jouissance is forbidden to he who speaks, as such’ (E, 319) … (p. 92)

Significantly, this ‘lethal’ jouissance is, according to the later Lacan, manifested in connection to a prevailing cultural fantasy. Quoting again from Ragland (2013) at length,

The absurd aspect to the death drive is this: the original or first pleasures—having become libidinal fixations—do not ground humans in genuine pleasures but in the pain of repetition Lacan called the reality principle. In our attempts to keep the ground from shifting, we idealize our objects, clothes, people and thoughts with the ideological garments of the good, the true and the beautiful. But the unconscious moves as desire, tracking evacuated jouissance, as desire and sexuality dancing in the endless vacillation around a void. (p. 100)

Therefore, all jouissance is compelled by the death drive in that it attaches libidinal investment into a phantasmatic object—what Lacan refers to an ‘Objet petite a’—that is always out of its grasp.

Self-hood, hence, is repetitively but only ever precariously secured in what can be termed the ‘lethal life’ of the subject connected to a cultural fantasy promising ‘equilibrium’. Importantly, fantasy provides individuals not with actual unity but its eternal promise, securing their identification in the always disappointing attempts to achieve this wholeness. As Ragland (2013) presciently points out, for Lacan ‘ …there is no reality qua reality to which fantasy refers; there is only a fantasy constituting a person’s reality’ (p. 159). Lacan supports this insight through a concept of ‘history’ found not in past events or in personal development but the repetitive pursuit of wholeness linked to this repetitive interplay between the ‘life’ and ‘death’ drives. He declares in ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’,

This limit is present at every instant in what is finished in this history. It represents the past in its real form; it is not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historical past in which man finds the guarantor of his future but rather the past which manifests itself in an inverted form in repetition. (Lacan, 2002: 262)

The theoretical importance of the ‘death drive’ for identity sheds light on current constructions of self-hood prioritizing an individual’s pursuit of a fulfilling life outside of work. Revealed is a narrative in which subjects secure their identity ironically only through perceiving their life as being continually ‘imbalanced’ and therefore needing to be ‘balanced’. Here, work is entrenched as a fundamental part of an individual’s broader self-hood. The remainder of this analysis examines, thus, the rise of the ‘fatal’ fantasy of ‘balance’ and its paradoxical promotion of capitalist employment and organizations for stabilizing and regulating identity.

Introducing the fatal capitalist fantasy of ‘work–life balance’

The established relationship of ‘work’ and ‘life’ is rapidly changing. Conventionally, ‘work’ and ‘life’ were separated along gender lines, whereby the ‘ideal worker’ was ‘a man whose work was his life and whose wife takes care of everything else’ (Acker, 1992: 257). The increased entrance of women into the workplace, challenged this paradigm leading to calls for ‘family friendly’ company policies (Davis and Kalleberg, 2006; Durst, 1999; Wright and Wysong, 1998) catalyzing a larger movement for the creation of organizational cultures attuned to their employees ‘work–life balance’ (Callan, 2007; Lewis, 1997; Lewis and Cooper, 2005; Pringle and Tudhope, 1996; Rapoport et al., 2002). Quoting Byron (1998) ‘the needed workplace transformation has virtually nothing to do with organizational restructuring, and just about everything to do with working people making a personal commitment to the search for purpose, both on and off the job’ (p. 67).

Illustrated is a broader affective shift in how individuals identify with work and life. Modern organizational identities attached to desires for ‘balance’ emerged out of the attempt by firms to adopt strategies to meet a changing popular culture expecting more from the workplace than economic success. First ‘opens systems approach’ (Katz and Kahn, 1978) and later the ‘spillover theory’ (Staines, 1980) stressed the interdependence of work and life leading ultimately to the ‘compensation’ model arguing,

that an inverse relationship exists between work and family such that people make differing investments in each in an attempt to make up for what one is missing in the other (i.e. individuals with unsatisfying family lives, will try to pursue work activities that bring satisfaction, and the reverse). (Clarke, 2000: 749)

This proclivity to ‘compensate’ for professional dissatisfaction by over-investing in one’s personal life symbolized that the workplace was no longer the exclusive, or even primary, avenue for individuals to establish their identity and achieve psychological fulfillment.

This represents the rise of what can be termed a cultural fantasy of ‘balance’ based on the present-day subject’s desire to achieve ‘equilibrium’ associated with properly ‘balancing’ their personal and professional existence. Presented is an attractive vision where one can live life unencumbered from the constraints of their jobs:

It’s every worker’s dream: take as much vacation time as you want, on short notice, and don’t worry about your boss calling you on it. Cut out early, make it a long weekend, string two weeks together—as you like. No need to call in sick on a Friday so you can disappear for a fishing trip. Just go; nobody’s keeping track. (Belson, 2007)

Individuals are called upon to ‘Stop Living Your Job and Start Living Your Life’ (Malloy, 2005). Their over-riding purpose is understood to be ‘much deeper than simply choosing a satisfying career’ but instead ‘about adding meaning to your life’ (Malloy, 2005: 24).

Present is supposedly a new working ideal where individuals can achieve fulfillment by balancing conflicting work–life demands (Hattery, 2001; Parasuraman and Simmers, 2001). This directly counters previous conceptions of the ideal worker who has an unlimited amount of time to spend at work (Rapoport et al., 2002). No longer is sacrificing for the company seen as a heroic act (Collinson and Collinson, 2004). Rather the new ideal worker is one who can effectively balance her or his professional commitments with their non-work personal desires.

Despite emphasizing ‘freedom’, this fantasy nonetheless regulates identity, rendering individuals as ‘subjects of desire’ to a constant goal of becoming a ‘balanced’ subject. Given its inherent precariousness and eternal unfullfillment, scholars drawing upon Lacan have predominantly focused on the ‘permanent instability’ of any identification constituted by an unconscious ‘unstable fantasy’ (Harding, 2007; Roberts, 2005; Thornborrow and Brown, 2009). Yet, it is also paradoxically the exactly fatal character of this fantasy, one premised on the death drive and continual disappointment, that individuals gain and retain a precarious stability as a self through these underlying discourses. Jones and Spicer (2005) make this point nicely in reference to the elusive fantasy of ‘entrepreneurship’:

One secures identity not in ‘being’ an enterprising subject but in the gap between the subject and the object of desire. Not only does it not matter that the object is unattainable. This lack is central to maintaining desiring. And, as Lacan indicates, if we ever achieve the object of desire, it collapses—it falls apart and is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit. (p. 237)

Self-hood is importantly thus secured ‘by being included in a fantasy scene-which gives consistency to the subject’s desire’ (Žižek, 1989: 119). Nevertheless, this aspiration ironically retains its appeal only in being continually unfulfilled, what Stavrakakis (1999) presciently refers to as a ‘failed identification’.

For this reason, it is not surprising that values of ‘work–life balance’ elude any concrete definition. According to Kossek et al. (2010),

although concepts such as ‘work–family policies’ and ‘employer work–life supports’ are increasingly part of everyday discourse in employing organizations and in most industrialized societies (Kossek and Friede, 2006; Lewis et al., 2007), they are complex, ambiguous in meaning, and evolving in practice, rationales, and cultural acceptance. (p. 4)

Yet, it is this conceptual openness that ensures its general appeal to a diverse workforce. MacInnes (2008) notes ‘like peace, love and justice who can decry “balance” or family “friendliness”…until the devil arrives with the details’ (p. 46). However, work–life balance ‘is popular’ exactly:

because it appears to address an almost universal perception of shortage of time. It does so because of the vagueness of the debate’s terminology, which allows it to offer ‘something for everyone’ by the term ‘life’ to mean anything from parenting obligations to life. (MacInnes, 2008: 57)

The longing for ‘balance’, then, organizes identity around this elusive and never fully defined aspiration. Importantly, the substance of this subjective organization can differ dramatically depending on context. Meriläinen et al. (2004) discuss, in this respect, the contrasting and culturally specific ways that discourses of ‘work–life balance’ are shaping identification within the British and Finnish context. Speaking to consultants in these respective countries, they observe that in the United Kingdom work–life balance stands as a type of ‘resistance discourse’ to the traditional ‘ideal’ worker for whom personal obligations do not interfere with their professional performance. They note ‘For British consultants, it seems that “life” is the problem, because it gets in the way of work’ (p. 554). By contrast, in Finland, work–life balance exists as a normalizing discourse—part of a broader narrative where individuals can ‘have it both’. Here, ‘balance’ is about finding personal ‘solutions’ to both working and life responsibilities. Furthermore, sacrificing one’s career for personal wellbeing and goals is lauded as a ‘great heroic sacrifice’.

These analyses reveal the significance of fantasy and the death drive for sustaining this identity. The key, for example, in both the United Kingdom and Finland is that the fantasy associated with ‘work–life balance’ is constitutive of individual’s life and helps to stave off their ‘death’ as a social subject. Moreover, it is only in its continual failure that individuals remain ‘gripped’ by this fantasy. Its appeal lies not in its concrete definition or realization, but in its existence as a repeatable fantasy scene for organizing and temporarily anchoring self-hood. Thus, it is the constant never sated desire for balance, not the achievement of balance itself (which by any means is impossible) that is fundamental. To this effect, the achievement of ‘balance’ is an eternally unfinished journey of self-discovery and growth. Quoting Work-Life Balance.com, ‘Your best individual work–life balance will vary over time, often on a daily basis. The right balance for you today will probably be different for you tomorrow’. Crucial, in this regard, is the paradoxical jouissance that individuals gain from this lethal fantasy as eternally ‘imbalanced’ subjects.

The lethal production of the (im)balanced capitalist subject

The fantasy of balance represents a new emphasis on ‘life’ rather than ‘work’. Yet, this construction of the subject and investment of identity in achieving ‘balance’ is ironically sustained through the jouissance one gains in being permanently ‘imbalanced’. In this regard, it is exactly the failure of this desire that makes it so paradoxically enjoyable. This jouissance is what can be termed, then, lethal exactly due to the fact that it is both inexorably linked to the death drive and never fully able to provide subjects a secure identification, leading them always back to the ‘real’ of their self and the potential disintegration of their precarious identity. What a Lacanian analysis reveals, then, is not only or simply that balance leads to further imbalance but that it is exactly because of this dynamic that it is so affectively appealing.

This fantasy constructs identity around a utopian self who has achieved ‘life balance’. Yet, this identity is equally dependent on the presence of a non-preferred ‘unbalanced’ self. Individuals are warned against the dangers of ‘workaholism’ which is portrayed as an addiction that must be appropriately identified and treated (Sussman, 2012; Weissman, 2013). They are urged to avoid ‘extreme overwork’ (Machlowitz, 1980) by striving for a ‘healthy’ and ‘balanced’ life outside the workplace. Essential to this struggle is the need to ‘recognise the importance of protective factors including exercise, leisure activities and friendships. Try to ensure that these are not sacrificed in working longer hours, or try to ensure that spare time is spent on these things’ (Ryrie, 2003: 22).

This affective narrative reflects the stabilizing function of being ‘imbalanced’. Crucially, self-hood revolves around the continuous attempt to achieve an elusive personal fulfillment threatened by the demands of contemporary employment. Identity is stabilized in the repetitive, but always ultimately disappointing, efforts to lead a ‘balanced’ life against the malicious forces of corporate expectations. This utopian ideal explicitly rejects the ‘rat race’ of modern employment, calling on people to ‘escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich’. Employees must learn ‘how to fill the void and creating (sic) meaning after removing work and the office’ (Ferris, 2007).

Illuminated is the lethal jouissance individual’s gain from being imbalanced. Significantly, jouissance must exist a priori to the formation of the self in the sense that for repetition to continually occur it must already be grounded within an existing psychic economy of life and death. Accordingly, the jouissance attached to the longing for ‘equilibrium’ (both fundamentally and as particular to a symbolic order) provides the coordinates for the construction and maintenance of the self. As such, the subject is always driven by the jouissance they receive in death in that they are seeking an impossible unity associated with a culturally provided desire whose very survival depends on it remaining forever unsatisfied. To this end, the appeal, and as such underling affective ‘grip’, of ‘work–life balance’ is the ‘painful pleasure’ one gains from its perpetual (im)possibility.

This reading echoes the insights of Costas and Grey (2014) linking organizational identity to fantasies of a ‘future oriented self’. They examine, in this respect, temporality as a socially constructed part of identification and note that an ‘imaginary future self’ can serve as a form of resistance to dominating and exploitive present conditions as well as a coping mechanism to deal with their present exploitation as corporate subjects. Revealed, in turn, is how the ‘ideal’ life is literally a fantasy—a romanticized vision of the future. What is particularly interesting for this argument is how it maintains ‘life’ as an idealized aspiration, and the jouissance of not attaining it provides individuals with a means for continually grounding their identity and staving off ‘death’. It is exactly in not having to experience this non-corporate future, that it retains its power and helps to keep individuals ‘alive’ as a present-day capitalist subject.

Lacan identifies both positive and negative aspects to this lethal jouissance. The positive jouissance one garners from the death drive is in being repetitively included in a dissatisfying fantasy. The case study of public service managers by Ford and Collinson (2011) captures this positive jouissance gained from being imbalanced. Here, these high-level managers organized their self-hood around their continued efforts at ‘rebalancing (their) work and life’ (p. 265). The key, in this regard, was not the achievement of balance but the opportunity to constantly identify their ‘imbalance’ and act to improve it.

Especially, telling was the admission by a manager named ‘Robert’ who ostensibly had come to a place of relative balance due to having to re-evaluate his orientations after his wife became seriously ill. After declaring that ‘Work is still important, but it’s only work’, the authors observed that ‘Robert appeared to be slightly uncomfortable with what he was saying, as if he was trying to convince himself that work was less important, and that he could be more relaxed about its impact on him’ (p. 265). Witnessed in this exchange was the unsettling effect of being outside of this fantasy, of being deprived of the stabilizing jouissance of being ‘unbalanced’. Revealingly, ‘Robert’ responds to this moment of discomfort by returning to this comfortable lethal identification with being ‘unbalanced’, stating that,

Well I sometimes have to remind myself, but you know, because I can get obsessed, but I’m getting better at not being obsessed, and I probably have been a bit obsessed in my first … I’ve been here four years now, so I’m learning to back off a bit … I’m trying to teach myself to. (p. 265)

The negative aspect of jouissance attached to the death drive is the inscription of new events into this phantasmatic framework of lethal jouissance. It is negative, in that these events can unmoor a fantasy and therefore threaten this stabilizing jouissance. For this reason, it must be adapted to fit this repetitive, and always unfinished, affective narrative. This analysis builds on Ekman’s (2013) recent discussion directly associating work identity with a fantasy of ‘limitless potential’. Here, both managers and workers invest in each other, specifically in the idea that all employees have ‘limitless potential’ to self—actualize, fulfill all their personal goals and professionals ambitions, through their work and at their workplace. What is key for this analysis is that this ‘limitless’ also translates onto the attempt to ‘balance’ work and life. Individuals are paradoxically limited to a capitalist ‘life’ through being seduced to the notion of a ‘limitless self’ at work. It is exactly this enjoyment of ‘imbalance’ that makes the fantasy limitless (e.g. can incorporate any and all new experiences) and self-hood limited (e.g. can only be structured around capitalist work and life).

In the case of ‘work–life balance’, Ford and Collinson (2011) show how this desire for balance comes to encompass all new experiences, following individuals throughout their career lifespans. They note that events such as ‘births of a child or children, chronic illness of relatives’ as well as interpersonal conflicts with colleagues or simply professional exhaustion ‘caused some to challenge their view of the perfect and ideal manager’ (p. 267). While different managers responded to this new orientation in their own individual ways, what remained constant was the recuperation of these events and feelings into an affective fantasy of ‘balance’ and their shared lethal production as capitalist subjects linked to the ‘painful pleasure’ found in being ‘imbalanced’.

Work as the contemporary limit of life

Fantasies of balance continue to ironically organize self-hood and identification around capitalist work and organizations. Emerging is an affective discourse where capitalist labor and companies once again take center stage. As previously mentioned, scholars note that while firms have become more attuned to their workforce’s non-economic needs involving family and lifestyle (Crompton and Lyonette, 2006; O’Brien and Hayden, 2008; Sheridan and Conway, 2001; Thompson, 2002), they have also been used strategically to enhance employee loyalty and productivity (Alvesson, 2000; Caproni, 2004; Healy, 2004; Rego and Cunha, 2008; Scholarios and Marks, 2004). ‘Life’ policies like hiring an onsite chef or providing round the clock daycare, for instance, ‘can create work–life imbalance’ in that ‘they sent the message “stay at work longer” and did not help create a balance between work and downtime with family, friends, hobbies, and other personal pursuits’ (Rose, 2008).

Gestured to by these analyses is how this fatal fantasy regulates identity to reflect the needs of the organization. Values of balance supposedly enhance the autonomy of workers to coordinate their life and home responsibilities (Felstead et al., 2002). Significantly, boundaries between work and life are constantly evolving and shifting (Cohen et al., 2009). Such shifts and the demand for balance can increase rather than decrease individuals stresses and anxieties. According to Watts (2009), ‘The psychological impact of juggling working and caring roles and fitting in a whole range of duties is often very stressful and sometimes overwhelming’ (p. 38). In this way, the attempt to achieve balance is both a cause for insecurity and an attempt to ‘to achieve some sense of order between our work and home lives’ (Cohen et al., 2009: 240). The jouissance gained from being imbalanced is channeled into constant efforts to personally better ‘balance’ their professional and personal obligations and desires.

This lethal jouissance found in being ‘imbalanced’, furthermore, can lead individuals to reinvest in work as the foremost priority in their life. The fantasy of balance relies upon a romanticized notion of life outside of work. Yet, this jouissance is put at risk when individuals directly encounter non-work experiences and find them unpleasurable. The stress and pressure of raising children, managing budgets or even planning and going on holiday, challenges the pleasurableness of non-work existence and therefore the jouissance gained as an ‘unbalanced’ subject. Put differently, if life is not pleasurable, then what is the point of trying to balance work and life? This represents what Lacan refers to as the ‘death zone’ that exists according to Ragland (2013) ‘ …in each of us is demarcated by the limit of the symbolic, then, at the point where it fails to stretch over the real’ (p. 99).

Within the context of the fantasy of ‘work–life balance’, individuals are put in danger of entering this ‘death zone’, the part of the ‘real’ that cannot be covered over, when the direct experience of ‘life’ is not pleasurable, thus depriving them of the jouissance garnered from the elusive prospect of finding ‘equilibrium’ as a ‘balanced’ subject. Here work, or more precisely, the over-investment in work, allows individuals to experience the jouissance associated with the death drive linked to the impossible pursuit of ‘balance’ again. Rather than encounter the real, the void at the center of their existence, they can come back into the protection of fantasy. It is not so much that ‘life’ is unpleasurable, in this regard, but merely unavailable to them as hard working individuals. Returning to the case study of Ford and Collinson (2011), they note that,

In some cases ‘presenteeism’ tend to be combined with a deliberate strategy of avoiding family-related chores at home. During informal discussions with the management team, some described how they chose to stay at work into the early evening so as to avoid having to participate in bathing the children and reading the bedtime stories. (p. 263)

While Ford and Collinson argue for how this represents, at least in part, the continued gendered nature of this discourse in practice, a Lacanian analysis points to a slightly different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, explanation. Namely that these experiences with ‘life’ constitute an encounter by these employees with the ‘death zone’, leading them to avoid life outside of work exactly so that it may remain an ideal for securely organizing their self-hood as an ‘imbalanced’ subject. To confront the ‘realness’ of ‘life’—its emptiness, its inability to provide individuals fulfillment—would constitute a more fundamental subjective death, the disintegration of their ‘reality’, and existence as a social subject, as it represents, quoting Ragland (2013) again, ‘the limit of the symbolic, then, at the point where it fails to stretch over the real’ (p. 99).

The statements of some of these managers who explicitly ‘prioritized their employment’ bear witness to this ironic linkage between a reinvestment with work and a fantasy of work–life balance. ‘Kevin’, for instance, noted that while he would like to be more ‘balanced’ his senior position and higher salary forced him to publicly show others beneath him how committed he was to his job. By contrast, but ultimately to similar ends, ‘Truti’ justified spending longer hours at work in order to support the personal fulfillment of her husband and children.

Such understandings are also displayed in Muhr and Kirkegaard’s (2013) study of the productive fantasy of the ‘dream consultant’. These consultants continually ‘dream’ of ‘off-work’ activities that are impossible to realize because of their present work commitments. Such fantasies of ‘life’, importantly, justify their exploitive conditions at work. It also permits them to fantasize themselves as ‘more than work’, thus allowing them ironically to invest more deeply in their job. What is crucial here is that it is exactly in maintaining an ideal life outside of work as a fantasy that it again retains its power and grants them jouissance as a capitalist subject. To actually fully embrace a life separate from work, let alone conceive of an existence outside a capitalist system, to realize this impossibility, would be to invite their disintegration. In this respect, life stands as the highest ideal but quickest path to ‘death’ as a subject. It is work that keeps one ‘alive’ while it is ‘life’ which invites death.

Work stands, consequently, as a contemporary limit of life, as the enjoyment of life depends on its repetitive situating within a capitalist fantasy of ‘balance’. Companies offer individuals the opportunity to continually play out this work-based fantasy. Traditionally, greater commitment to the firm, such as through working longer hours, contributed to the ‘visibility–vulnerability spiral’ (Kram and Hampton, 1998). However, ‘visibility’ now often centers upon publicly ‘balancing’ work and life, and increasingly organizing life to reflect these work values. This could include, for instance, publicly being ‘healthy’ (Cederström, 2011), commonly through a company’s gym plan, or taking advantage of the chance to ‘hang out’ while at work on corporate campuses like Googleplex (Hoagland, 2006). Here, identity regulation, and managerial control, centers upon the affective investment individuals place in firms for continually securing their self-hood as an ‘imbalanced’ subject.

Land and Taylor (2010) present a telling example of this in their case study of employees at a ‘new age’ company that sold sporting clothes and goods where the firm’s anti-corporate ethics was also a force for identity regulation. For instance, the ‘too nice to work day’ voucher they gave each of their staff for good performance was in fact made into an opportunity for individuals to make ‘visible’ how they were leading an exciting personal life in line with the organization’s image, such as when one employee used it to go kayaking for the day which she posted on the company’s blog. The firm, hence, served as the inspiration and source for individuals to repetitively and publicly secure their self-hood as a subject constantly seeking ‘balance’ ironically through their job. In this respect, through a fantasy of work–life balance individuals no longer simply ‘work to live’ or ‘live to work’ but rather often ‘live for work’.

Concluding discussion

This article introduces contemporary discourses of ‘work–life balance’ as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood paradoxically around capitalist employment and organizations. To do so, it draws upon Lacan’s interpretation of the Freudian concepts of the life and death drives. With respect to ‘work–life balance’, ‘individuals’ are maintained as subjects through their identification with being ‘imbalanced’. This speaks to Freud’s (2002) original view of psychoanalysis as ideally permitting individuals to simultaneously live, love, and work. In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (p. 101), for instance, he wrote: ‘The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love …’. Yet, what this article shows, that it is exactly the desire for and enteral inability to achieve this ‘equilibrium’ between work and life that ironically structures present-day self-hood and identification. Consequently, capitalist work and organizations stand as the contemporary limit of ‘life’ through their fundamental role in producing and sustaining this ‘imbalanced’ subject.

Theoretically, this article hopes to shed light on the value a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective can have for present understandings of ‘work–life balance’. There is a growing literature in the field critiquing discourses of ‘balance’ for perpetuating work intensification as well as masking the managerial character of the workplace. This research aims to add to such perspectives by highlighting the affective aspects of this phenomenon. It investigates ‘work-life balance’ in terms of its organization of individuals psychoanalytically, highlighting the trauma and anxiety that drive this continued identification with desires to be ‘balanced’. In this respect, it proposes to ask not only ‘how’ subjects are shaped by these values but also to quote Jones and Spicer (2005) ‘why is it that subjects accept, indeed actively desire to construct themselves in relation to discourse?’, in this case ‘work–life balance’ (p. 224).

The concept of the death drive is especially illuminating for such discussions. The preservation of the social subject relies upon the elusive promise of attaining a psychoanalytic unity believed lost in infancy. Yet, this unity is every only illusionary and as such the subject finds ontological security – though only precariously so – not in its impossible attainment but in the eternal strive for its achievement. In this respect, their jouissance is found paradoxically in the continual unfulfillment and therefore continued promise of this unity to come. Put differently, by continually dying, being thwarted, it remains alive as an unconscious and conscious ideal for structuring and sustaining self-hood. Furthermore, it ironically leads individuals to commonly reinvest and deepen their ‘disequilibrium’ in order to avoid confronting the fundamental emptiness and non-pleasurable character of the object of their desire. In the contemporary context, the jouissance gained in the dream of becoming ‘balanced’ is found in the eternally available ability to remain continually disappointed, in this regard. The professional sphere is a necessary component for the construction and preservation of this current subject of ‘balance’ and their commitment to ‘life’.

More broadly, this work seeks to contribute to organization studies and theories of the subject overall by clarifying and expanding upon understandings of identity regulation related to the psychoanalytic self. The growing emphasis firms place on the personal rather than professional shows the need to move beyond normative accounts of regulation stressing, whether explicitly or implicitly, value internalization. Required instead is an understanding of capitalist and organizational regulation as the inexorable linking of individual desire, and therefore identity, to firms. Through a deeper engagement with the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian death drive, this analysis connects such regulation to the situating of self-hood within the ‘love, strife, death triad’ of fantasy. Thus, it argues that the importance of an organizational signifier like ‘work–life balance’ is found not principally in the substance of its meaning but its structural function for preserving an individual as a ‘subject of desire’ connected to their organizational identity as a capitalist worker.

This article additionally builds upon critical literature associating ‘life’ discourses with new forms of managerial control. The present regulation of the workforce no longer revolves simply around direct coercion or the normative identification with company values. Instead, it emphasizes themes of ‘existential empowerment’. Fleming and Sturdy (2009), for instance, introduce the concept of ‘neo-normative’ control to describe the effort of firms to secure employee obedience through allowing them to express their ‘authentic’ self. Cederström (2011) in a similar vein explores the present regulation of workers through managerial efforts to enhance individual’s personal health. This resonates with the ways neo-liberalism ‘sells’ leisure, thus further confusing the boundaries between work and life (Lewis, 2003). Intervening within these discussions, this analysis explores how desires for personal fulfillment separate from professional obligations and aspirations can ironically strengthen an individual’s affective investment to capitalist work and organizations. Like recent work that explicitly links fantasy to discourses stressing the contemporary relation of work and life (Costas and Grey, 2014; Ekman, 2013; Muhr and Kirkegaard, 2013), this article highlights by drawing on Lacan’s notion of the ‘death drive’, how without work contemporary individuals would have no ‘life’ as a subject.

This analysis thus critically draws upon a Lacanian approach to better explain the ways individuals continue to organize their lives around professional responsibilities despite explicitly prioritizing personal goals. To this end, it follows in the tradition of thinkers such as Foucault who emphasize that in the present age of neo-liberalism subjects ‘live to work’ rather than ‘work to live’. The modern subject is ‘simultaneously always a producer, always a family member and always a consumer’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2004: 90). What this article seeks to show is how it is ironically in this longing to overcome this ‘imbalance’, to ‘work to live’ and not be ‘boundaryless’, that individuals remain even more strongly a capitalist and organizational ‘subject of desire’. They literally cannot go on subjectively ‘living’ without capitalist work.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the former People, Organization and Work (POW) Research Group at the Swansea University School of Management for their early intellectual contributions to this article. In particular Dr. Pasi Ahonen, Professor Carl Rhodes, Dr. Sam Dallyn, Professor Alison Pullen, Dr. Sheena Vachhani and Dr. Paul White. I would also like to thank the four anonymous reviewers and the editor whose insights were invaluable to the improvement of this paper.

Author biography

Peter Bloom is a lecturer in the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University. His primary research interests include ideology, subjectivity and power, specifically as they relate to broader discourses and everyday practices of capitalism and democracy. His scholarly work has been published in journals including Human Relations, Theory and Event, Journal of Political Ideologies, Journal of Political Power, Research on the Sociology of Organization, Culture and Organizations, Ephemera, Journal of Organizational Change Management. His writing has also been featured in The Washington Post, The New Statesmen, The Week, The Conversation and Open Democracy among others.

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Work as the contemporary limit of life: Capitalism,the death drive,and the lethal fantasy of ‘work–life balance’

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Balancing contemporary identity between work and life

Lacan, the death drive, and the ‘Lethal Life’ of the subject

Introducing the fatal capitalist fantasy of ‘work–life balance’

The lethal production of the (im)balanced capitalist subject

Work as the contemporary limit of life

Concluding discussion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Author biography

References