Glynos, Jason. in Carl Cederström and Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) Lacan and Organization London: MayFlyBooks, 2010
There is a general consensus in the literature that the mode of engagement associated with an ethics of ‘openness’ is to be preferred, especially when thinking critically about the political economy and about the transformation of the organization of work more specifically. What receives much less attention in this literature, however, are questions about
(1) what these alternative modes of engagement actually look like in practice; and (2) the conditions under which a transition is made from one to another mode of engagement.
There is of course considerable theoretical reflection on the concept of ethics in Lacan, which for many has become synonymous with the idea of ‘traversing the fantasy’. But there is a need to add to these ontological discussions a more robust ontical base by, for example, building up a corpus of empirical examples, exemplars, or paradigms of different sorts of ethical engagement associated with the ‘dissolution’ of the logic of fantasy. This would entail supplementing existing studies that furnish negative critiques of modes of engagement characterized by ‘closure’ with rich phenomenological accounts of what appears on the ‘other side’ of posited fantasmatic traversals.
What conditions and devices, for example, might promote a specifically democratic ethos in organizations akin to a Lacanian ‘ethics of the real’?
For a call to explore the relation between a radical democratic ethos and an ‘ethics of the real’, see Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox,(conclusion); on this, see also Glynos, J. (2003) ‘Radical democratic ethos, or, what is an authentic political act?’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2(2): 187-208.