‘Not even semblance’: exploring the interruption of identification with Lacan
用拉康理论分析员工自我呈现中认同的中断,通过公共部门案例揭示话语中的矛盾、失误如何为抵抗和意义重构提供空间。
This article explores the question of identification through a Lacanian lens, paying specific attention to the interruption of identification in the self-presentation of employees. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real is taken up here as a conceptualization of the limits inherent in representation, and the unexpected effects of signification that go beyond the meaning effects engendered in the process of speaking. Identification is viewed here as an iterative condensation and simplification of recurrent significations within a local organizational context, aiming to displace and repress the indeterminacy of meaning and the failure of intentionality in discourse. Interview material from a public sector case study is used to analyse identifications with images of the ‘ideal employee’, which can be interpreted through interviewees’ moves to demarcate themselves from images of the ‘non-ideal’. The analysis then turns to examine interruptions in this self-presentation in the form of slips, contradictions and breakdowns of the narrative. The article concludes that the examined interruptions indicate considerable space for resistance and re-signification in identifications.