Cooperative Subjects: Toward a Post-Fantasmatic Enjoyment of the Economy

Abstract

This piece explores practices within some cooperative firms as attempts to foster a subject who has a particular relationship with work and with the community economy. We call this relationship identifying or working in the gap: deriving satisfaction from engaging with the various antagonisms, conflicts, and contingencies that attend the cooperative and its relationship with the community in which it is constituted. Drawing on complementary strains of poststructuralist Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, we speculate that such subjects are post-fantasmatic in relation to the economy—not in the sense that they no longer have narratives that explain their working lives, but that these narratives do not revolve around capitalocentric economic fantasy and its various symptoms and resentments. We offer a few brief examples of worker coop members working in and identifying with the gap, attempting to keep the negativity of communal production intact through the different phases of collective economic activity.

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