Volume 12(2): 223–246 ISSN 1350–5084 Copyright © 2005 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship articles

Campbell Jones University of Leicester, UK

Andr´e Spicer Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK

Abstract. This paper engages with debates on enterprise culture and one of its key subjects—the entrepreneur. Enlisting the work of Jacques Lacan ˇ zek, and Slavoj Zi ˇ we attempt to explain the continuing failure of entrepreneurship discourse to assign the character of the entrepreneur a positive identity. Shifting away from stable categories such as ‘the entrepreneur’, we describe entrepreneurship in terms of Lacan’s concept of ˇ zek’s the Real and Zi ˇ concept of the sublime object. This allows us to critically scrutinize the operation of the phantasmic category of the entrepreneur. In addition to indicating some prospects for the future of psychoanalytic cultural criticism in organization studies, we make a case for a continual questioning of the subject, a questioning that is today being foreclosed by those critics who were first to call the subject into question. Key words. entrepreneurship, du Gay, Foucault, Lacan, the ˇ zek Other, the Real, the Subject, Zi ˇ

Introduction: ‘Hey, You There!’ In a handful of notes and drafts that pre-date Foucault’s explicit accounts of subjectification by several years, Louis Althusser indicated a rough sketch of subject formation in terms of what he called ‘interpellation’ (Althusser, 1971, 1995; see also, for example, Foucault, 1982). Concerned with the function of ideology in reproducing capitalist social formations, DOI: 10.1177/1350508405051189

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Organization 12(2) Articles Althusser identified the way that ideology operates through the category of the subject, by ‘“constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’ (1971: 171). This constitution of subjects takes place through a dynamic of ideological recognition, a process of ‘identifying’ with or ‘recognizing’ oneself in a particular ideology: hence the hypothesis that ideology works by interpellating subjects, by calling them up and in doing so constituting individuals as subjects. As Althusser puts it: I shall suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ subjects among the individuals (it transforms them all) by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’. (Althusser, 1971: 174)

On Althusser’s account, the subject responds to the call by turning around, and in the act of turning around becomes a subject. Although such a conception of the constitution of subjects outlines an intuitively plausible parable of the relation between the subject and the constituting call, questions immediately arise as to the efficacy of the interpellative act. Althusser suggests that ‘the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognises that it is really him who is hailed’ (1971: 174). Such an account suggests a particularly forceful authority on the part of the caller, which may be the case in certain situations, but also might overemphasize the authority of the interpellative power and invite charges of ‘determinism’. Recognizing that Althusser introduces the image of the police hailing as a self-conscious simplification, we also face the question of why it is that, hearing a call, a subject would turn around. The obverse of this, of course, is the question of why and how the subject might reject a particular call, refusing to identify with the interpellative apparatus. If these are pressing problems for those working with an Althusserian conception of interpellation, it is equally an issue for those working with variants of this conception, probably the most common of which in organization studies is a Foucauldian account of subjectification. This Foucauldian image, which clearly draws on and extends Althusser’s concerns (see Jones, 2002), sees subjects as formed or constructed in ‘discourse’ but still inherits similar problems. The questions remain: why is it that subjects accept, indeed actively desire to construct themselves in relation to discourse? If we reject a humanist vision of an isolated subject who is immune to or only ever repressed by discourse, and also want to be able to explain the constitution of the subject in discourse, then we need to pose the question of why it is that subjects recognize themselves in discourse, that is, why they turn around when they are called. In this paper we outline a specific way of approaching these questions, which cut to the core of contemporary debates about subjectivity and

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer resistance. We suggest that a particularly powerful approach to these questions might be found in the work of Jacques Lacan, work that has (we think unfortunately) been underutilized in organization studies. We suggest that a broadly Lacanian conception of the relation between the subject and language might offer a way out of some of the impasses that currently puzzle those concerned with issues of subjectivity and resistance. We work through these general claims by focusing on the specific case of the operation of discourses of enterprise, their effects in the constitution of enterprising subjects, and problems around the category of ‘the entrepreneur’. We begin with a discussion of one exemplary account of both subjectification and enterprise, which can be found in Paul du Gay’s examination of enterprise culture. Du Gay’s work and subsequent responses can be read as a significant moment in a debate around how a discourse (here enterprise discourse) hails subjects who then further the cause of post-industrial capital through their own volition. Revisiting these debates will help us to pose the question of the subject in a Lacanian register or, better, show that Lacanian answers are sometimes already there, in the most unexpected places.

Why du Gay Is Not (Always) a Foucauldian In a series of papers (du Gay, 1991, 1994; du Gay and Salaman, 1992) culminating in his books Consumption and Identity at Work (du Gay, 1996) and In Praise of Bureaucracy (du Gay, 2000b, see also 2003, 2004), du Gay offers a critical analysis of enterprise culture and of its consequences for ‘the construction of new work identities and the production of different work-based subjects’ (1996: 3). At first glance the theoretical frame is broadly Foucauldian: enterprise appears in the form of a discourse that enacts relations of power through the construction of subject positions, in a process that involves ‘making up’ enterprising subjects. In a recent intervention, Fournier and Grey (1999) criticize du Gay’s work on enterprise on a number of counts (see also Fournier, 1998; Armstrong, 2001a,b).1 Although their criticisms are wide-ranging, of interest here are their comments about subjectivity and their charge that du Gay offers ‘too little’ of an account of resistance and of alternative discourses to enterprise. They charge, in short, that in du Gay’s work ‘enterprise is treated deterministically’ (Fournier and Grey, 1999: 117). In doing so, Fournier and Grey evoke the now widespread criticism of Foucauldian organization studies on the basis that it denies, or at least displays a tendency to neglect, the possibility of resistance (see, for example, Gabriel, 1999; Newton, 1998; Reed, 1998, 2000; Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995; see also Fleming, 2001; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001a,b). Fournier and Grey’s case is more sophisticated, and indeed more paradoxical, than a simple dismissal of du Gay’s analysis of enterprise on the grounds that his Foucauldianism leads him to ignore resistance. They insist that a Foucauldian approach is not necessarily inimical to accounts

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Organization 12(2) Articles of resistance, and hence they try to avoid the simplifying and ultimately disappointing rejection of Foucault that we find in critics such as Thompson and Ackroyd, who suggest that ‘neglect of resistance . . . reflects the limitation of Foucault’s analysis where, in the desire to avoid explanations at the level of the subject, human agency gets lost in the constitution of the subject solely through discourse’ (1995: 625). Indeed, what we find interesting in Fournier and Grey’s criticism is the paradoxical and equivocal nature of their charges against du Gay, which offer themselves for closer scrutiny. Although Fournier and Grey argue that du Gay fails to account for resistance, they are faced with the problem, which they admit, that du Gay does in fact attempt to offer an account of resistance to enterprise discourse. In his response to Fournier and Grey, du Gay insists: ‘I have gone out of my way to indicate on a number of occasions, both theoretically and empirically, the impossibility of eradicating difference, diversity and antagonism from organizational relations’ (du Gay, 2000a: 178). Fournier and Grey concede that du Gay does ‘attempt’ to account for resistance, citing du Gay when he writes that: While the official discourse of enterprise tries to produce particular meanings for and forms of conduct among employees that will in turn produce quality service for customers and a sale for the company, it cannot completely close off the processes of the production of meaning nor totally determine how particular norms will be enacted. (du Gay, 1996: 160, cited by Fournier and Grey, 1999: 119)

Fournier and Grey suggest that du Gay ‘escapes complete determinism and makes space for resistance’ (1999: 120) by turning to the sphere of consumption, but conclude that du Gay’s analysis of consumption ultimately fails to reintroduce resistance. The problem with such an argument is that it fails to recognize that it is not through a turn to relations of consumption that du Gay seeks to ‘escape determinism’ and that du Gay introduces motifs of resistance by turning, at crucial points, to a quite different theoretical source. To put it bluntly, Fournier and Grey too easily assume that du Gay simply adopts a Foucauldian view of the subject, and in doing so they fail to notice when du Gay draws on quite different sources. Fournier and Grey argue that, compared with his earlier articles: In Consumption and Identity at Work, du Gay presents a less deterministic view of enterprise; he draws on Foucault to suggest that no discourse or mode of rationality is complete or has complete power over its subjects. He admits the impossibility of one form of government to capture the real, so that ‘government is a congenitally failing operation’. (Fournier and Grey, 1999: 119)

Let us follow the twists and turns of du Gay’s text more closely. Directly following the comment ‘government is a congenitally failing operation’, which appears on page 73 of Consumption and Identity at Work, du Gay explains: ‘The “Real” always escapes attempts to govern it

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer because there is always a “surplus” separating the “Real” from its symbolization’ (du Gay, 1996: 73). Now, the problem is that this is not Foucauldian language. Indeed, du Gay’s capitalization and insertion in quotation marks of ‘the Real’ (which strangely disappear when Fournier and Grey mention it) are far from accidental but make explicit reference to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s quite specific conception of ‘the Real’. Indeed, the Real is a central concept for Lacan—we might even say that it is the Lacanian concept par excellence.2 This reference to Lacan is quite explicit, and we find an outline of a range of Lacanian concepts in the pages running up to the section cited by Fournier and Grey (du Gay, 1996: 70–3). In these pages du Gay outlines some of the basic formulae of a Lacanian conception of the social, and hence argues that ‘all attempts to capture the “Real” symbolically ultimately fail. There is always a “left-over”, a “surplus” separating the “Real” from its symbolization’ (du Gay, 1996: 70). Let us be clear, the source of this jargon comes via Lacan, not Foucault. Here du Gay draws ˇ zek as well as Laclau and Mouffe, writers who are all significantly on Ziˇ influenced by Lacan. This ‘ineradicable surplus’ is described by du Gay, ˇ zek (1989), as a ‘traumatic real kernel’ and, following Laclau following Ziˇ and Mouffe (1985), as an ineradicable ‘antagonism’ (du Gay, 1996: 71). Paraphrasing Laclau and Mouffe, du Gay finds that contradiction and resistance are inherent in any social system because ‘“the social” is “always an inconsistent field structured around a constitutive impossibility”, a fundamental antagonism’ (du Gay, 1996: 71, see also Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 125–7).3 Even with these brief indications from the text, it should be clear that du Gay has a ‘theoretical safeguard’ from determinism, which appears not in a turn to consumption but in the category of the Real which he borrows from Lacan. His references in these crucial sections are not to Foucault (as is suggested by Fournier and Grey) but to Lacan and to ˇ zek and Laclau and Mouffe. When Fournier ‘Lacanians’, specifically Ziˇ and Grey argue that du Gay ‘draws on Foucault to suggest that no discourse or mode of rationality is complete or has complete power over its subjects’ (Fournier and Grey, 1999: 119, emphasis added), they fail to acknowledge the preceding section of du Gay’s work and in doing so fail to be clear about the moments in which du Gay turns, not to Foucault, but to Lacan and the Lacanian tradition. Having located the impact of a certain reading of Lacan on du Gay, we should not revert to a simplistic notion of inheritance that would see du Gay’s work as simply or singularly determined (see Jones, 2002). We should be alerted to the dangers of positioning du Gay’s work, as Fournier and Grey seem to do, as simply ‘in a Foucauldian tradition’ (Fournier and Grey, 1999: 108). Rather, we should insist that any work, and du Gay’s work is no exception, is multiply determined, or ‘overdetermined’ as Freud (1974) would say. We could suggest that du Gay’s work on enterprise is caught between (at least) two determinations, one

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Organization 12(2) Articles that is a Foucauldian conception (borrowing from Rose, Miller, Gordon, etc.) of the construction of subjects through discourse, and another that is ˇ zek, Laclau and Mouffe, etc.), a Lacanian conception (borrowing from Ziˇ which sees the construction of subjects and the full or final constitution of subjects or society as impossible.4

Outing Lacan When we say that in du Gay there is a tension between a Foucauldian and a Lacanian conception of the subject, this is not to say that du Gay is a ‘closet Lacanian’, which might imply that there is a genuine Lacanianism that could be found behind his Foucauldian veneer. Rather, it is to say that his text is drawn in two directions, caught between two determinations and unable to decide conclusively on one direction or the other. Further, taking into account the marginal position of Lacan in organization studies, it is not totally surprising that the Lacanian influence went unremarked by Fournier and Grey. Whereas Lacan has had a significant impact on cultural and social theory, his work remains largely unexplored in organization studies. Even when addressing issues that are of central concern to Lacan such as the subject and language, there has been a tendency in organization studies to privilege Foucauldian frames of reference. We can see this here in an extreme form when the Lacanian influence on du Gay’s work passes without comment under the critical gaze of Fournier and Grey. This is perhaps explicable with reference to the repression of psychoanalysis and Lacan in organization studies. Lacan is typically given only passing mention in works that survey organization studies (Clegg et al., 1996: 235–6; Jackson and Carter, 2000; Warwick Organizational Behaviour Staff, 2001: 621) and fails to attract the attention of those outlining ‘critical’ approaches to management and organization (see, for example, Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Thompson and McHugh, 2002; Wilson, 1999). Lacan has been almost totally sidestepped in debates over postmodernism and organization, not being mentioned in the contributions to this debate by Burrell (1988, 1994), Cooper (1989), Cooper and Burrell (1988), Hancock and Tyler (2001b), Hassard and Parker (1993) or Parker (1992). Nevertheless, there is an established tradition of using psychoanalytic concepts to ask questions about organizational life. This is famously associated with the classical tradition of the Tavistock Institute, and the early works of writers such as Jacques (1951), although psychoanalytic and psychodynamic explorations of work and organization now constitute a veritable cottage industry (see, for example, Baum, 1987; Diamond, 1993; Gabriel et al., 1999; Hirschhorn, 1988; Kets de Vries, 1984, 1993; Kets de Vries and associates, 1991; Maccoby, 1976; Schwartz, 1990). This work has clearly established the significance of the unconscious and ostensibly ‘irrational’ aspects of organizational processes and shown how there is much more to organizational life than meets the eye.

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer In relation to the entrepreneur, the work of Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries (1977, 1985, 1996) is exemplary of this tradition in the way that it opens the door to the ‘dark side’ of entrepreneurship, even if we might want to argue that the theoretical and political complexities of this dark side are foreclosed in his analytic practice. Some who are working in, or at the edges of, this psychoanalytic tradition have found it productive to draw on Lacan. The journal Human Relations, which has been broadly sympathetic to psychoanalytic studies of organization for some years, has occasionally allowed Lacan into the fray (see, for example, Leather, 1983; Long, 1991; Frosh, 1997) and has recently published work that engages both Lacan and questions of organization (Arnaud, 2002; Vanheule et al., 2003). Gilles Arnaud (2002) has indicated a vast array of ways in which understandings of concepts such as leadership and organizational symbolism might be transformed by a Lacanian approach, and Vanheule et al. (2003) take up concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic in order to interpret executive burnout. In addition to this recent work, we should be aware of other Lacanian work on organization, which ranges from those who mention concepts such as ‘the Other’ in passing or introduce basic concepts (for example, Carr and Zanetti, 1999; Cooper, 1983), to those who have used Lacan to engage questions such as consultancy (Arnaud, 1998), information processing (F¨ay, 2000), public administration (McSwite, 1997a, 1997b) and corporate responsibility (Roberts, 2001). In terms of our own approach (to the extent that we are able to know what ‘our approach’ is), we might suggest that we are making an effort to extend, and in doing so to problematize, this tradition of the psychoanalytic critique of organization. We draw selectively on the writings of Lacan, although we are drawing particularly on the consequences of Lacan for cultural critique. Importantly, whereas Arnaud (2002) and Vanheule et al. (2003) elect to conduct organizational analysis using the concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, we will here emphasize the Real, which is the third and possibly most disruptive element of Lacan’s theoretical triangle. The Real is also the element to which du Gay explicitly refers, and we will use it in the course of this paper in our attempt to disclose the phantasmic character of the entrepreneur. We are more than aware of certain limitations in Lacan’s work, the most obvious of which is his sometimes excessive writing style, something to which we should be alert even if we do not feel inclined to disparage this as an ‘art of evasion’ (Derrida, 1981: 110). More problematic perhaps is his troubled relationship with questions of gender, which results in part from Lacan’s often over-enthusiastic identification with Freud and the patriarchal stain this leaves on Lacan’s work. Anyone hoping to engage with Lacan must face up to this stain, although we do not think that a stained carpet is necessarily a useless one (see also Grosz, 1990). In the light of such problems, and drawing critically on the work of Lacanian critics such as Brennan (1993), Copjec (1994), Salecl (1998)

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Organization 12(2) Articles ˇ zek (1989, 1997, 2001), we propose to engage Lacan in and in particular Ziˇ order to address specific questions of subjectivity and enterprise, while remaining cautious of this endeavour and of previous discussions of Lacan. This is not a marketing exercise on Lacan’s behalf. But first, because Lacanian jargon is not generally taken as legal tender in organization studies, perhaps we should explain some basic principles and clarify some basic misunderstandings.

Beyond the Mirror Stage . . . and Back When Lacan has been taken up in organization studies, it has been almost exclusively through discussion of the concept of ‘the mirror stage’, which appears in his early paper ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (Lacan, 1977a/1937). In this paper, Lacan tells the parable of the act of a young child who, from about the age of six months, becomes able to recognize its own image reflected back to it. The child ‘unable as yet to walk, even to stand up [and] still sunk in his motor and nursling dependence’ is able to fixate on its image, in an act of what we know as identification (Lacan, 1977a: 1–2). This early experience is, for Lacan, central to the formation of self and is a central metaphor in his early work, which focuses on what he calls ‘Imaginary’ relations—the relations of identification of a subject with an image. If we were to go no further we would find here the Hegelian motif of the development of self-consciousness, the story of the subject coming to know itself by being recognized in the eyes of others, which is one of the guiding strands of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1977; see also Carr and Zanetti, 1999; Hancock and Tyler, 2001a). The mirror stage, in this reduced form, is often taken to be Lacan’s contribution, offering a conception of the subject who finds itself mirrored in its relations to others. In an example that is particularly telling, such an image of Lacan appears in the conclusion to McKinlay and Starkey’s edited book on Foucault, Management and Organization Theory (1998; see also Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002). Discussing shifts in Foucault’s work and possible changes in the way that Foucault could be used in organization studies, Starkey and McKinlay outline a possible move ‘from discipline to desire’. Noting that the predominant use of Foucault in organization studies has been to deal with questions of power and discipline, they bring to the fore the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality (1985, 1986) in which Foucault began more explicitly to theorize the subject as an active desiring agent. In this context, Starkey and McKinlay (1998: 237–8) offer the work of Lacan as a way forward from Foucault, but once again, although we find such a proposal potentially attractive, we should admit our disappointment at what is actually achieved. In their outline of what might be gained from Lacan, Starkey and McKinlay fail to get beyond the most simplistic commonplaces about the mirror stage.

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer This is significant because Lacan offers far more than a model in which the subject recognizes itself in the mirror of the social. Indeed, such a model could be easily found in Hegel, in Mead, or in a variety of social psychologies in which the self is socially constructed in its daily interactions with others. Such a model of the subject is a beginning, but it might too easily reduce Lacan to some form of ‘social constructivist’ in which the relation between the subject and the Other is easy and satisfying, and in which the subject ‘takes up’ a whole and coherent ‘identity’ in relation to the Other. This reduction of the mirror stage to the social construction of self and the failure to engage with the radical challenge of Lacan’s short paper on the mirror stage are our first obstacle. And this is an obstacle that Lacan himself faced in his teaching. Already in 1955 he noted the ways in which the term was being abused, and hence the quip ‘The mirror stage is not a magic word’ (Lacan, 1988: 102). The mirror stage, for us, is not a comforting discovery. If we go back to the opening of this, his ‘first’ work, we find Lacan insisting that the conception of the mirror stage ‘leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito’ (1977a: 1). The challenge of the mirror stage is not in seeing the subject as being constructed in relation to the Other, a notion that is anyway almost a commonplace today. The challenge is that the act of recognition simultaneously involves a dynamic of misrecognition (see also Pˆecheux, 1994). The subject perceives itself as whole, as a bounded and effectively ‘good’ entity surrounded by the evils of the world. This is the self-satisfying image of a coherent subject in which, as Lacan puts it, ‘the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium—its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips’ (1977a: 5). Here we are approaching an understanding of Lacan’s conception of the subject. Through the mirror stage the subject deceives itself into coherence through a phantasmic relation to the Other. The subject misrecognizes a coherence that represses its fragmented character. Hence, for Lacan, ‘[t]he subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving and realised image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image. That is where it finds its unity’ (1988: 54). As Lacan’s teaching continued, we find this notion of the ‘decentrement’ of the subject elaborated and extended. A decisive shift is signalled by the introduction of the category of ‘the Real’, a concept that becomes increasingly important for Lacan (and that, as we saw earlier, is central to Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of society, which is variously taken up and then forgotten by du Gay and by Fournier and Grey). Refusing to see psychoanalysis as an idealism (Lacan, 1979: 53), or seeing symbolization as total, Lacan identifies the Real as that which escapes symbolization. The Real is, in Miller’s eloquent definition, ‘that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all

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Organization 12(2) Articles articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped’ (Miller, 1977: x). In order to clarify what is meant by the Lacanian Real and its role in signification and subjectification, consider the famous, but puzzling, painting by Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (see also Lacan, 1979: 88–9). In this painting we find two subjects who appear before us constructed and hailed by the signs around them. Their fine clothes indicate their wealth, the Oriental rug indicates that these are men of travel and experience, and the instruments of the arts and sciences of the time indicate that these are learned Renaissance men. It appears that we have a relatively successful interpellation: the figures are hailed by the signifiers that exist around them, and they answer with a definite identity of being ambassadors, the painting’s simplistic title. However, there appears to be an obstacle in interpreting this pattern of signification, in the form of a strange blotch at the feet of the ambassadors. Is this a silly mistake by one of Holbein’s scoundrel apprentices? The pelt of an animal worn by ‘howling savages’ from a far-off land? If we inspect this blotch from the correct angle, we are struck by a skull staring us right in the face. All the fineries of life-affirming wealth suddenly pale into insignificance as this horrific reminder of death opens a hole in the signifying chain. It is this hole that then comes to frame, shape and indeed ‘motivate’ the pattern of signification and interpellation in this picture. The two men are not only interpellated as ambassadors (men of learning, experience and wealth), but also simultaneously ‘pulled apart’ by the ghost of mortality indicated by the skull. This skull points us towards the Lacanian Real—the traumatic, unspeakable of death in this case. Moreover, it is this ‘silent’ Real of death (whose place is held by the traumatic signifier of the skull) that throws the rest of the signification in the painting into being as signifiers. The Real, this rupture in the symbolic fabric, is ‘the stroke of the opening that makes absence emerge—just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence’ (Lacan, 1979: 26).

Lack Is in the Other The Real appears, then, as an obstacle to the effective constitution of the subject in discourse, and, for us, is one of the markers that distinguishes Lacan from Foucault. Having identified a lack in the subject, which the subject attempts to stitch up or ‘suture’ through its Imaginary relation to the Other (see Miller, 1978), the Real produces a limit or lack in the symbolic order or, to put it simply, a lack in the Other. Hence, we have moved some distance from the simplistic ‘mirror stage’ image of the subject recognizing itself in the Other, to finding the subject lacking or ‘barred’ in relation to the Other. As a corollary, when a subject recognizes itself in the ‘mirror’ of discourse (subsequently constructing its subjectivity), it never achieves full recognition. The subject never closes on the centre of the subjectivity that is imputed in discourse because it is

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer structured around a traumatic central gap—which is what Lacan calls ‘the Real’. The subject is never able fully to internalize and identify with the Other of discourse. There is something in the subject that resists, or more accurately ‘escapes’, vocalization. For Lacan, it is this inability to close the gap within ourselves, to ‘truly become ourselves’, that keeps us becoming, identifying and speaking. It is from this central gap in identification that our (impossible) desire to identify flows. We speak because we cannot quite explain ourselves, because our explanation of ourselves is lacking. If we closed this gap in our identity (an event that would be impossible for Lacan), then the business of constant chatter about who we are, what we want, how we plan to get it and so on would come to an end. It is that which is ‘in the subject more than the subject’ that makes us subjects and keeps us subjected (Lacan, 1979: Ch. 20). So not only is the subject barred by a central traumatic gap, but the Other with which the subject attempts to identify is also barred. Hence the Lacanian formula ‘the big Other does not exist’ and the crossing out not simply of the subject but more radically of the Other (Lacan, 1977b: ˇ zek outlines this move: 315–16). As Ziˇ Today, it is a commonplace that the Lacanian subject is divided, crossedout, identical to a lack in the signifying chain. However, the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in recognizing this fact but in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barre, ´ crossedout, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/ ˇ zek, 1989: 122) traumatic kernel, around a central lack. (Ziˇ

Not only is the subject structured around an unsignifiable lack, the Other with which the subject identifies is also structured around a central lack. Once the subject searches for something in itself with which it can identify, and fails, it turns towards the Other. This search for the Other is bound to fail, just as an attempt to answer ‘who is God?’ or ‘what is Virtue?’ ultimately proves futile. Each of these attempts to answer who or what the Big Other is ultimately finds itself wallowing in futile attempts to fill in an unsignifiable universal with particulars. Repeated attempts to identify who or what this big Other is seem only to uncover a gap in signification—something we cannot say. It is this central gap, the traumatic kernel, the unsignifiable lack in the Other, that motivates and drives our attempts to keep on identifying with it. Even though the Other demands something from us—discourse about God demands devotion, discourse about Virtue demands virtuosity—its demand is both impossible and yet prohibited. It is because we can never completely subsume the Other, we can never fully incorporate it into our language, that we are driven to attempt to identify with it and to speak it. It is the unrepresentable nature of the God that has kept religious iconologists and priests in work for thousands of years, and it is the unrepresentable nature of virtue that keeps Euthyphro and Meno attempting to explain what virtue is to Socrates. It is this gap in the Other

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Organization 12(2) Articles that provides the subject with ‘breathing space’. Therefore the subject experiences not only lack in itself but lack in the Other. It is this lack in the Other that motivates our consistent attempt (despite, or precisely because of, our continual failure) to internalize the Other.

The Search for the Heffalump Having briefly outlined Lacanian concepts of the subject and the Real, let us now return to questions of enterprise. We can find examples of Lacanian concepts such as lack in the Other in the most unexpected places, and this is clearly visible in the variety of scientific and pseudoscientific research that has been put into the search for the entrepreneur. In such studies the most detailed researches have been conducted into establishing once and for all the character of the entrepreneur, asking what exactly it is that makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur. A raft of propositions about the positive identity of the enterprising subject have appeared, including the need for achievement (McClelland, 1961; Johnson, 1990), the internal locus of control (Duchesneau and Gartner, 1990), low risk aversion (van Praag and Cramer, 2001), and self-reliance and extraversion (Lee and Tsang, 2001).5 However, right from the beginnings of this now well-established research programme, the entrepreneur has not yielded to empirical analysis. Researchers seem continually to run into failure. For example, one writer complains: ‘for ten years we ran a research centre in entrepreneurial history, for ten years we tried to define the entrepreneur. We never succeeded’ (Cole, 1969: 17). Some use more colourful and romantic language to describe their failure: The search for the source of dynamic entrepreneurial performance has much in common with hunting the Heffalump. The Heffalump is a rather large and very important animal [see Milne, 1926, 1928]. He has been hunted by many individuals using various ingenious trapping devices, but no one so far has succeeded in capturing him. All who claim to have caught sight of him report that he is enormous, but they disagree on his particularities. Not having explored his current habitat with sufficient care, some hunters have used as bait their own favorite dishes and have tried to persuade people that what they caught was a Heffalump. However very few are convinced, and the search goes on. (Kilby, 1971: 1)

This pattern of failure is not part of the distant past of entrepreneurship research; it seems quite clear that there has been little reward for the increased research effort over the past 30 years. Contemporary proponents of entrepreneurship repeat the woeful refrain of their predecessors: ‘there is no generic definition of the entrepreneur’ (Brockhaus and Horwitz, 1986: 42); ‘entrepreneurship is like obscenity: Nobody agrees what it is, but we all know it when we see it’ (Shaver and Scott, 1991: 24); ‘There is little empirical evidence to support the notion that a single trait or collection of traits can explain the business behaviour of many widely different entrepreneurs’ (Grey, 1998: 151). Hence, after all

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer these years, proponents of entrepreneurship are still dismayed that ‘the study of entrepreneurship is still in its infancy’ (Brazeal and Herbert, 1999: 29). All of these authors see this ‘litany of errors’ as an indication of the correctable failure of entrepreneurship discourse. The failure of all past efforts only hardens their resolve; they simply need to try harder. Hence the failure of all previous research into the character of the entrepreneur is taken to be something to do with the failings of earlier researchers (‘they didn’t try hard enough’; ‘they didn’t apply the right method’ . . .), rather than something to do with the object of enquiry. The failure to find the centre of entrepreneurship in the subject of the entrepreneur has led entrepreneurship researchers towards an investigation of ‘structural’ factors outside the subjectivity of the entrepreneur. These include experiential factors such as individual entrepreneurs’ prior experience and education, which allow them to recognize opportunities and innovate (Shane, 2000); firm-level factors such as organization context, firm resources and competitive strategy (Entrialgo et al., 2001); inter-organizational factors, including networking activities by firm and number of partners (Lee and Tsang, 2001); an existing community of entrepreneurs, especially in new industry creation (Mezias and Kuperman, 2001); the industry population density (Manigrat, 1994); the industry structure (Herron and Robinson, 1993); societal-level factors, including national culture effects on entrepreneurial personality (Thomas and Mueller, 2000; Mueller and Thomas, 2001); and the state entrepreneurial climate, particularly the availability of financial capital for entrepreneurs (Goetz and Freshwater, 2001). The proliferation of structural causes has led entrepreneurship researchers to suggest that the ‘traumatic kernel’ of chaotic penetrations of a variety of causal factors may be the cause of the entrepreneur (Bygrave, 1989; Smilor and Feeser, 1991). It therefore appears that the central gap of chance, which brings a variety of causal factors together, lies at the centre of the Other of enterprise discourse. Indeed, Ogbor’s (2000) and Armstrong’s (2001c) critical analyses of the ideology of entrepreneurship argue that the defining feature of entrepreneurship discourse is the consistent and congenital failure to identify the entrepreneur positively. All that enterprise research can therefore offer us is a continued failure to find the character of the entrepreneur and a massive proliferation of ‘other’ structural determinants of enterprise. But what if research into the entrepreneur has, in its very failure, identified something critically important about the operation of the category of the entrepreneur, that is, that it is essentially indefinable, vacuous, empty? What if entrepreneurship research has not failed at all, but has uncovered something significant about the underlying structure of entrepreneurship discourse, that is, that ‘the entrepreneur’ is an empty signifier, an open space or ‘lack’ whose operative function is not to ‘exist’ in the usual sense but to structure phantasmic attachment? This would be

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Organization 12(2) Articles the Lacanian hypothesis: the entrepreneur is a marker of this lack; the entrepreneur is indefinable, and necessarily so; the entrepreneur is an ‘absent centre’. To say all of this is to make a decisive shift in the way that we think about objects, introducing as it does the order of a quite different thing, not the thing that we commonly perceive but what Lacan ˇ zek calls a ‘sublime object’. calls ‘the Freudian Thing’ or what Ziˇ When we speak of the ‘failure’ of entrepreneurship research, then, we are not talking about failure in the normal sense. We are thinking of a logic of ‘failure’ that, in its very act of repetition, brings to light a deeper and more profound truth. This could be thought of as failure in the Hegelian sense, in the way that the course of ‘errors’ of the past brings to light a higher order of truth. This logic comes to light clearly in a number ˇ zek calls ‘Hegelian jokes’ (Ziˇ ˇ zek, 1989: 64–6, 160–1, 173–8). of what Ziˇ ˇ zek tells the joke of a conscript who tries to avoid military For example, Ziˇ service by pretending to be mad. His symptom is that he compulsively checks all the pieces of paper he can lay his hands on, constantly repeating: ‘That is not it!’. He is sent to the military psychiatrist, in whose office he also examines all the papers around, including those in the wastepaper basket, repeating all the time: ‘That is not it!’. The psychiatrist, finally convinced that he really is mad, gives him a written warrant releasing him from military service. The ˇ zek, 1989: conscript casts a look at it and says cheerfully ‘That is it!’. (Ziˇ 160)

The point is that a certain truth comes to light through the repetition of ˇ zek explains, ‘[t]he “mad” conscript pretends to look for failure. As Ziˇ something, and through his very search, through its repeated failure ˇ zek, 1989: 160). (“That is not it!”), he produces what he is looking for’ (Ziˇ We could suggest that we have much the same situation with entrepreneurship research. The search for the character of the entrepreneur and for the structural factors that cause entrepreneurship continually fails.6 Although this is generally treated as a failure, indicating the need to try harder, the Lacanian insight is that this failure is indicative of the deep structure of the operation of the object of the entrepreneurship. Rather than blundering around cursing and saying ‘That is not it! That is not it!’, entrepreneurship research has discovered something very important, which should be not denied but interrogated. Following Lacan, that is it! In line with the position we have been trying to lay out here, there is something peculiar about enterprise and entrepreneurship that is generally denied. What is denied is something central to the very object of the entrepreneur, something that, we have argued, is glimpsed by entrepreneurship research but is rationalized and hence pushed out of sight. We are suggesting that entrepreneurship discourse is not a coherent and stable discourse, held together around a stable centre. Rather, it is a paradoxical, incomplete and worm-ridden symbolic structure that posits an impossible and indeed incomprehensible object at its centre. To put it

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer in the strictest Lacanian formulation, entrepreneurship discourse does not exist. In quite a different sense, of course, entrepreneurship discourse clearly does exist. It offers a narrative structure to the fantasy that coordinates desire. It points to an unattainable and only vaguely specified object, and directs desire towards that object. And here the Lacanian formula ‘What desire desires is desire itself’ is particularly useful. 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. We find that Bill Gates is just an ordinary human being, with perfectly normal and human neuroticism, but he is elevated to heroic status as if there is something unique to his psyche that is the ultimate cause of his economic successes. So, even though the discourse of enterprise culture might represent the apparently contradictory, paradoxical and free-floating text celebrated by some postmodern approaches to organization studies, it rarely produces the expected liberating effects. Rather, it is precisely the paradoxical and apparently mysterious nature of entrepreneurship discourse that allows it to be so effective in enlisting budding entrepreneurs and reproducing the current relations of economic domination.

Conclusion: Foucault and the Question of the Subject In this paper we have ventured a number of what might appear to be controversial suggestions. We have cast suspicion on several assumptions about the nature of enterprise, and more broadly about subjectivity. These have not simply been applied to empirical objects (this or that entrepreneur, for example), but have also been applied in the case of writers we have engaged with, so that, as regards du Gay, we were unwilling to claim a core kernel or ‘essence’ of his position. In the place of such satisfying fictions, we preferred to see subjectivity as complex and fragmented. But it is precisely this complexity and difficulty that make enterprise discourse so alluring. This pushes us to suggest other dominant discourses that might be approached in an analogous way, because of the way they display the character of sublime objects (for example, ‘the consumer’, ‘quality’, ‘knowledge’, ‘innovation’, ‘technology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘creativity’). By arguing for a Lacanian conception of the entrepreneur, we hope we might contribute to opening up the state of current debates in organization studies about subjectivity. It is our view that these debates have become unnecessarily closed off and, rather than continuing to think about the problems of the subject, have become complacent and repetitive. One way the question of the subject has been reopened is by contemporary critics pointing to the apparently over-deterministic account provided in Foucauldian approaches to subjectivity. We have

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Organization 12(2) Articles seen this most clearly in the criticisms by writers such as Armstrong (2001a,b), Gabriel (1999), Newton (1996, 1998), Reed (1998, 2000), Thompson and Ackroyd (1995) and Thompson and Smith (2001). Although the arguments have clearly been made against a rather selective opponent (the most naive, determinist version of discourse analysis), these authors have traced the existence in some areas of Foucauldian scholarship of serious problems for those taking up a Foucauldian approach to subjectivity. In the studies that these authors have selected to criticize, ‘no actual accounts of resistance can normally be found’ (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995: 624), and they have concluded that subjectivity is a ‘diversion’ from a more proper concern with employment relations and the labour process (see Thompson and Smith, 2001: 52–3). In response to this criticism, a number of writers have rushed to Foucault’s defence, either in theoretical arguments (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001a,b) or by turning their Foucauldian gaze to actual instances of resistance (see, for example, Ball and Wilson, 2000; Fournier, 1998; Knights and McCabe, 2000a,b). In this work there are explicit efforts to account for resistance while still retaining a broadly Foucauldian frame. The other strategy of writers working in a Foucauldian tradition is to develop accounts of agency and resistance by turning away from the ‘genealogical’ Foucault towards the ‘ethical’ Foucault found in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality (Starkey and McKinlay, 1998; Starkey and Hatchuel, 2002; Styhre, 2001; Wray-Bliss, 2002). Here we have tried to avoid either outright rejection of Foucauldian accounts or an impassioned attempt to reassert the Foucauldian purchase around questions of subjectivity, by demonstrating how they might develop an account of both agency and discourse. We are not alone in this; others have attempted to remedy these problems by turning to alternative theoretical sources. The most notable efforts here have been the work of Tim Newton (1999, 2001a,b), which has sought to draw on the work of Norbert Elias; Hancock and Tyler’s (2001a) recent work exploring aspects of Hegelian metaphysics; Anthony O’Shea’s (2002) account of the relationship between desire and subjectivity, by mobilizing the work of Bataille; Peter Fleming’s (2002) tracing of the hidden traditions of conceptions of subjectivity that are implicitly mobilized in organization studies; and Jones’ (2003) drawing on Levinas and Derrida to indicate the role of alterity and undecidability in the ethical relation. In this paper we may have made some minor contribution to this work of exploration of alternatives by introducing certain Lacanian arguments. But we do not want our work to be taken as suggesting another finality, another set of answers to how to think the subject. On the contrary, if there is any general point about our framing of questions such as that of the subject, it is one of radical vulnerability and limitation. And this applies to us as authors. Hence, we should be clear that the question of

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The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship Campbell Jones and Andr´e Spicer the subject, far from being about to be answered once and for all, is only now beginning to be posed in organization studies. This effort to open out the question of the subject rests on a conviction that it should not lose its status as a question. The question of subjectivity, and of its relation to power, resistance and organization, has led to a number of valuable insights. But it seems to us that current debate on these questions has solidified into a set of dangerously problematic positions. Rather than turn away from the question of the subject and treat it as a diversion, or simply assert that there are no problems with the ways that we have thought the subject, we have argued here for looking further at the question of the subject. We have, perhaps implicitly until now, been arguing that the question of the subject is ultimately that—a question, and one that should be open to continuous scrutiny and rethinking. And in this process of rethinking we have, in this case, found it productive to draw on Lacan. This drawing on Lacan has not, we should emphasize, sought to argue ‘against’ Foucault or against Foucauldian accounts of the subject. But it has involved indicating that there are a number of productive ways of rethinking questions of the subject, and that Foucault and Foucauldian organization studies do not and should not have a monopoly on the question of the subject.

Notes An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Critical Management Studies Conference, Manchester, UK, 12–14 July 2001. 1 It is perhaps not pure chance that the title of Fournier and Grey’s attack, ‘Too Much, Too Little and Too Often’, is so reminiscent of the kind of kettle-logic that Freud outlines as his defensive strategy in his dream about Irma’s injection: ‘The whole plea—for the dream was nothing else—reminded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly that he had never borrowed it from his neighbour at all’ (Freud, 1976: 197). 2 ‘The term “real”, which was at first of only minor importance, acting as a kind of safety rail, has gradually been developed, and its signification has been considerably altered. It began, naturally enough, by presenting, in relation to the symbolic substitutions and imaginary variations, a function of constancy: “the real is that which always returns to the same place”. It then became that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. Hence the formula: “the real is the impossible”. It is in this sense that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic’ (Miller, 1977: x). 3 We could stress further the important influence of Laclau on Consumption and Identity at Work, from the introduction, which evokes Laclau’s suggestion

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Organization 12(2) Articles that ‘any social identity is basically dislocated’ (du Gay, 1996: 2), through to the crucial section we have discussed above, in which the impossibility of society is evoked to pre-warn of the problem of determinism (du Gay, 1996: 70–3), and at a number of other points in the book. In fact, in this book Laclau is mentioned more times than any other author. To put it mathematically, the cast of major characters, in order of number of appearances, is: Ernesto Laclau (16), Nikolas Rose (15), Tom Peters (13), Paul du Gay (11), Michel de Certeau (10), Michel Foucault (9), Peter Miller (9), Stuart Hall (8), John Allen (7), Colin Gordon (7), Chantal Mouffe (7). The distance between Laclau and Foucault could also be made explicit. Laclau positions the influences on his work as being principally poststructural theory but particularly deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory ˇ zek, 1990), and notes (Laclau, 2001; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xi; see also Ziˇ that ‘the work of Foucault has had only a very limited influence on my own approach, and I feel towards it only a very limited sympathy’ (Laclau, 2000: 285). 4 If we were to take these arguments further, we might suggest that Fournier and Grey’s critique of du Gay misses precisely by resting on a simplistic hermeneutic that fails to identify and explicitly theorize the equivocations and tensions in du Gay’s text. Fournier and Grey seem to use, in their argument, exactly the conception of text and meaning that they find so objectionable. They see the text as unified and coherent—‘fully sutured’ Lacan would say— and deny this text its proper plurality, confusion, contradictions and inconsistencies. They do not go far enough (‘too little!’) and end up treating du Gay’s text as being what Freud might call a ‘unicellular creature, as compared with the complicated structures of such comparatively severe neuroses as we usually meet with’ (1974: 373). 5 We sketch the history and politics of the positive valuation of the entrepreneur in Jones and Spicer (forthcoming). 6 We should stress that failure takes place at the level both of the subject and of the structure. This makes us suspicious, therefore, of any notion of ‘structuration’, which would promise a tidy victory but would run the risk of resulting in a ‘double failure’ by failing to account for the impossibility of both the subject and the structure in question.

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Campbell Jones teaches critical theory and business ethics at the University of Leicester. He is currently writing, with André Spicer, a book that seeks to ‘unmask’ the category of the entrepreneur. Address: Management Centre, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. [email: [email protected]] Andr´e Spicer is a lecturer in organization studies at Warwick Business School. He is interested in the politics of organization. He is currently investigating entrepreneurship, theories of organizational struggle, globalization discourse in the public sector, and alternative media organizations. Address: Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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