Lacan and Organization Carl Cederström & Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) may f l y Lacan and Organization Carl Cederström & Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) The work of Jacques Lacan has become an influential source to most disciplines of the social sciences, and is now considered a standard reference in literary theory, cultural studies and political theory. While management and organization studies has tradition- ally been preoccupied with questions of making corporations more efficient and productive, it has also mobilized a strong and forceful critique of work, management and capitalism. It is primarily as a contribution to this tradition of critical scholarship that we can see the work of Lacan now emerging. In this edited collection, a number of organizational scholars have made common cause with political theorists and psychoanalysts. Together they explore the many intersections of Lacan and organi- zation. The contributions address a series of pertinent questions: What are the new templates for control in the workplace? How is subjectivity produced in contemporary organizations? And how can a Lacanian reading of contemporary work politics render new insights into resistance and ethics? This edited collection includes contributions from Peter Fleming, Rickard Grassman, Jason Glynos, Campbell Jones, Carol Owens, André Spicer and Yannis Stavrakakis. may f l y www.mayflybooks.org Today, at one and the same time, scholarly publishing is drawn in two directions. On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of scholarly publication, creating a situation in which the means of distribution of books grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the present are increasingly restricted. In this context, MayFlyBooks has been established as an independent publishing house, publishing political, theoretical and aesthetic works on the question of organization. MayFlyBooks publications are published under Creative Commons license free online and in paperback. MayFlyBooks is a not- for-profit operation that publishes books that matter, not because they reinforce or reassure any existing market. 1. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory 2. Dag Aasland, Ethics and Economy: After Levinas 3. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique 4. Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets 5. Peter Armstrong and Geoff Lightfoot (eds), ‘The Leading Journal in the Field’: Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management 6. Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds), Lacan and Organization LACAN AND ORGANIZATION Lacan and Organization Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) First published by MayFlyBooks in paperback in London and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2010. Printed by the MPG Books Group in the UK CC: The editors and authors 2010 ISBN (Print) 978-1-906948-10-8 ISBN (PDF) 978-1-906948-11-5 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Contents Contributors ix Preface xiii Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers 1 Lacan and Organization: An Introduction 1 Casper Hoedemaekers 2 Lacan at Work 13 Jason Glynos 3 Symbolic Authority, Fantasmatic Enjoyment and the Spirits of Capitalism: Genealogies of Mutual Engagement 59 Yannis Stavrakakis 4 The Unbearable Weight of Happiness 101 Carl Cederström and Rickard Grassman 5 For the Love of the Organization 133 André Spicer and Carl Cederström 6 You Are Where You Are Not: Lacan and Ideology in Contemporary Workplaces 169 Peter Fleming 7 Danger! Neurotics at Work 187 Carol Owens 8 Lacan in Organization Studies 211 Campbell Jones Contributors Carl Cederström is a lecturer in Human Resource Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. His research focuses on Lacanian psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics, and work. He is the co- author of How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Polity, 2010) and co- editor of Impossible Objects (Polity, 2011). His work on authenticity, happiness, health and love – among other subjects – has appeared in a range of journals and edited collections. Peter Fleming is Professor of Work and Organization at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has previously held positions at Cambridge University and Melbourne University. One aspect of his research focuses on emergent forms of power in the workplace, especially as it pertains to bio-politics and ‘biocracy’. Another interest is the social anthropology of corporate corruption. He is the author of the books Contesting the Corporation (2007, Cambridge University Press, with André Spicer), Charting Corporate Corruption (2009, Edward Elgar Press) and Authenticity and the Cultural Politics of Work (2009, Oxford University Press). Jason Glynos is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the Department of Government, University of Essex, where he is director of the MA Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. He has published widely in the areas of poststructuralist political theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, focusing on theories of ideology, democracy, and freedom, and the philosophy and methodology of social science. He is co-author of Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (Routledge, 2007), and co-editor of Traversing the Fantasy (Ashgate, 2005) ix Contributors and Lacan and Science (Karnac, 2002). His current research explores the contributions of discourse analysis and psychoanalysis to the development of a critical political economy. Rickard Grassman is a research and teaching associate in Organization Studies at Bristol Business School, University of the West of England. His research explores enjoyment, imaginings and images in the context of virtual networks and organizations, particularly by drawing on poststructuralist accounts. These interests are reflected in both journal articles and book chapters, including ‘The Masochistic Reflexive Turn’ (with Cederström, 2008), as well as ‘Desire and Ideology in Virtual Social Networks’ and ‘The Will to Nothingness’ (with Case, 2009). He is currently finishing his PhD, which focuses on dis-identification and dissociative identity symptoms ranging from cynicism and escapism to psychosis and pathologies. Casper Hoedemaekers is a lecturer in Organization Studies at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. His research interests include Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the study of subjectivity in the workplace, organizational control, transgressive practices in advertising and popular media, and the signification of creative labour. His work has appeared in a range of academic journals. Campbell Jones, University of Leicester, UK, has published several studies of the reception of French theory in management and organization studies. To this end, he has also co-edited Contemporary Organization Theory (2005, Blackwell) and Philosophy and Organization (2007, Routledge), edited special issues of the journal Business Ethics: A European Review around the work of Emmanuel Levinas (2007), Jacques Derrida (2010) and Alain Badiou (forthcoming), and co-edited a special issue of the journal Organization on Jacques Lacan and organization studies. His most recent book is Unmasking the Entrepreneur (2009, Edward Elgar) and he is currently writing a book called Can the Market Speak? Carol Owens is a practising and supervisory analyst in private practice in North County Dublin. She is a lecturer in the Department of Psychoanalysis at Independent College Dublin. She holds a PhD from the University of Reading, where she was formerly a member of the Beryl Curt research entity. She was editor of The Letter – Lacanian x Lacan and Organization Perspectives on Psychoanalysis for four years, and recently edited the Annual Review of Critical Psychology (http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm) dedicated to the examination of Lacan and critical transdisciplinary research/theorising. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis and on the application of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the fields of social psychology, queer theory and philosophy. André Spicer is a Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Lund University, Sweden. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on power and politics in and around organizations. His work has been extensively published in a wide range of journals and edited books. He has recently published books entitled Contesting the Corporation (Cambridge), Unmasking the Entrepreneur (Edward Elgar), Understanding Corporate Life (Sage), and Understanding Leadership in the Real World (Routledge). Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science at Panteion University (Athens) and discourse analysis at Essex and has worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham. He is currently Associate Professor at the School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the author of Lacan and the Political (1999, Routledge) and The Lacanian Left (2007,