The interrupted promise of the One: work, subjectivity and the metonymy of desire
Casper Hoedemaekers, Erasmus University Rotterdam
The concept of subjectivity has a central role in organization studies, as it addresses the relationship of the individual to itself and to others. As such, it has direct implications for how social relations can be conceptualized, including collective forms of action such as organization. In their participation in organizational processes, subjects are constantly implicated in processes that define and redefine them in relation to others. The self, far from an essential core or a set of traits, is constantly reconstructed within particular social contexts. This identity work has been the object of a stream of research that emphasizes the constitutive role of language in producing and shaping identities in organizations. This paper addresses this body of research and suggests a reconsideration of the relationship between identification and subjectivity.
In this paper I present an analysis of identity work by means the thought of the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan. I will explore the Lacanian notion of identification (Lacan, 1988a; 1988b; 2002) as a way of understanding identity work as part of subjectivity in an organizational context. I present illustrations of such identification, taken from case study research conducted in a large public sector organization in the Netherlands.
Lacan’s subject has no positive content but is in fact nothing more than a gap, or a split from the Other. It comes into being by means of its introduction into language, which is at once the condition for sociality as well as the loss of a pre-subjective, mythical wholeness. The demands, needs and experiences of the subject can afterwards only appear to her in a form mediated by the signifier. In this sense, language will always retain the character of something radically Other to the subject. For Lacan, language is at the basis of subjectivity and it is infused with social rules, norms and values. The subject orients towards language as Other, and looks for acknowledgement and validation from this Other. At the same time, the subject is also alienated by language, in the sense that it distorts the subject’s demand. Because of this, the subject is always left yearning for something beyond the confines of language. And it is the lack within the subject, its absence of content, which brings forward this desire.
The fundamental emptiness of the subject, the lack of self, is constantly filled in by means of identifications. Lacan speaks in this sense of “covering over the lack” of subjectivity. His understanding of subjectivity entails three dimensions, three “registers” of which the subject consists: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. The Symbolic order concerns language in its structuring form, the whole chain of signification that provides the subject with an unconscious ‘structure’. The Real is the term that Lacan coins for the fundamental lack in the subject, the point where language fails to grasp experience. The Imaginary is the conscious dimension of subjectivity, the locus of the ego and identifications.
This paper will focus mainly on this Imaginary register, and explore its relation to the other registers. The illustrations drawn from the case study are explored by means of two major mechanisms of the Imaginary: firstly, the mirror stage, and secondly, the modeling of the ego on the ego ideal.
The mirror stage describes how the illusion of a conscious, intentional and coherent self is reinforced by means of “misrecognition” of the self in interaction with co-workers and managers.
The ego ideal provides an “introjection of the Symbolic” (Fink, 2004) to the subject, a point from which the subject criticizes and reshapes its own ego. Here, the subject identifies with a particular condensation, an image of the network of signification that grounds its being. The illustrations from the case study demonstrate how employees create a subjective ideal for themselves, which forms the basis of their self-disciplining.
These mechanisms form identifications, in an iterative process, and create a sensation of Cartesian selfhood for the subject. However, the Imaginary only works to obscure the lack that inevitably marks subjectivity: the Real. The identifications of the subject are always partial and fragmented, and continually break down and fall away. The subject then glimpses the structuring properties of the signifier, the extent to which it owes its being to the Symbolic. This opens up possibilities for acknowledgement of the constitutive role of language by the subject, a “subjectivization” of the lack, and can potentially give way to more ethical forms of desire.
References
Fink, B. (2004), Lacan to the letter, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Lacan, J. (1988a), Seminar I: Freud’s papers on technique 1953-1954, translated by John Forrester, New York: Norton
Lacan, J. (1988b), Seminar II: The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis 1954-1955, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, New York: Norton
Lacan, J. (2002), Ecrits: a selection, translated by Bruce Fink, New York: Norton