Enjoy Your Work! The Fantasy of the Neoliberal Workplace and Its Consequences for the Entrepreneurial Subject

This article critically examines the ways in which organizational performance and audit practices intersect with the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, managerialism, and individualism to shape the experience of the entrepreneurial, "postneurotic" subject at work. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the article argues that the conditions for the contemporary subject are characterized by the declining efficacy of the Symbolic order, which induces the production of people whose identities are fragile and unstable. Paradoxically, this instability emerges at a historical moment at which individuals are commanded to "self-actualize" and to not be limited by authority or tradition. Neoliberalism makes "Work" assume particular importance in this project. The article argues that the decline of the Symbolic, in turn, places a heavy weight on interpersonal relationships in the Imaginary, or among alter-egos, to produce any semblance of a stable identity. Workplace performance measures and audit practices offer seductive points of identification and "quantifiable" stability for the subject in search of her "authentic" self at work in particular. Yet, at the same time, these measures painfully ensnare the subject in external identifications and managerial validation in new, constraining ways.