Ideological fantasy at work

Abstract

This paper explores the normative and ideological significance of fantasy in the context of workplace practices. I situate my approach to fantasy against the background of a ‘logics approach’ to social analysis, which is grounded in the post-structuralist and post-marxist genres of political theorizing. In considering a number of existing analyses of workplace practices which appeal to the category of fantasy, I focus on some studies in which fantasy can be said to play a role in sustaining workplace practices. I use this literature to draw out and formalize some basic features of the logic of fantasy, before turning my attention to a study which opens up a theoretical space for thinking about a mode of subjectivity which appears to escape the constraining logic of fantasy. Finally, using the insights gleaned from these studies, I develop an analytical framework centred around the logic of fantasy. The benefit of this framework, I claim, is that it makes clear the analytical distinction between two aspects of critique and transformation: an aspect linked to the norms of a practice and an aspect linked to the way subjects engage with those norms. Making this distinction explicit, I argue, allows us to pose interesting theoretical, critical, and methodological questions, including how these two aspects intersect in different contexts. The aim is to pluralize understandings of social and political critique and transformation, in a way which is relevant (but not necessarily tied) to workplace practices.

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