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Parker, I. and Fotaki, M. (2014) Prologue: Ian Parker on the psychosocial, psychoanalysis and critical psychology, in conversation with Marianna Fotaki, in K. Kenny and M. Fotaki (eds) The Psychosocial and Organization Studies: Affect at Work (pp. 1-17). London: Palgrave Macmillan [ISBN: 978-1-137-347848] PROLOGUE: IAN PARKER ON THE PSYCHOSOCIAL, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIANNA FOTAKI So first of all, let me thank you very much for agreeing to talk to us on the psychosocial. We are very honoured to be able to include your interview in our edited collection on psychosocial approaches to work. You have been an influential figure in critical psychology; so could we start with you telling me from a personal perspective how you found your way to critical psychology in the first instance? Well, I never knew what psychology was before I went to university. I had to choose a third subject to study along with the two main subjects that Id enrolled for, which originally were Zoology and Botany. So I come from a scientific background; my interest was always in the natural sciences; and I just studied psychology at university in the first year of my course because it was the only one that was available. But, at the same time that I started that course, I got involved in political activity. So I was interested, not so much in what psychology had to say in terms of revealing the underlying truths about human beings, but in what psychology did as a discipline. At that time in the 1970s, psychology wasnt as popular as it is now. A lot of people today know, or they think they know, what psychology is about. They confuse psychology with psychoanalysis and psychiatry and psychotherapy but they have an idea that its about the workings of the mind, and that it revolves around certain professionals who understand how people think and behave. But this is exactly what I was interested in from the beginning; how is it that people develop an image of psychology and give a power to it as a discipline so that it then comes to govern their lives, not only governing their lives explicitly through different apparatuses through which it operates: clinical psychology, educational psychology and so on but also in the hold that it has on people in the expertise that they attribute to the psychologists. So I went into psychology to understand how psychology worked, worked from the inside. I never believed in psychology, but Ive always believed that it was incredibly important to understand how it works. What is critical psychology, if you had to explain that in a very simple way? What does it mean for you? Well, some critical psychologists want to take psychological knowledge and use that knowledge in an empowering way to help to people to understand themselves. But I think, actually, for me that is part of the problem. I want to understand how it functions as ideology and how it functions as an apparatus of power, and I think thats how I define critical psychology. Critical psychology is a stance; instead of the psychologists looking out at what they think is the real world, we want to turn the gaze around and look at the psychologists, to understand where its

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come from historically, and how it operates in different cultures in its distinctive forms. Thats why were interested, for example, in the work of Vygotsky as a current in psychology that was connected with political transformation. But to understand that critically is to ask, in what ways does that critique still function as part of the discipline of psychology?, and what are the consequences of that? So we take a position which is on the margins of psychology, looking in at the discipline. For me thats what critical psychology is. So critical psychology might draw upon Marxist theory; it might draw upon feminism; it might draw upon post-structuralism, even psychoanalysis. We could talk about that later but always the question is how does this discipline come into being at a particular point in history, and what functions does it serve in the society? I was still waiting for that word, society. So you have not only been very well known for your work in the field of critical psychology but you are also a clinician, and you are a clinician that practises from a very specific psychoanalytic tradition, well go into that in a moment. But first, what is the relationship between psychology and psychoanalysis for you? Many people would think that, actually, psychology is at loggerheads with psychoanalysis. You can find more sympathisers of psychoanalysis in other disciplines, but not in psychology. But yet, here is Ian Parker who actually thinks differently. So whats the relationship, for you, between psychology, critical psychology and psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis has always been a problem. Its been a problem for psychologists, treated by the main psychology text books, usually American text books, as being completely different from psychology. But actually, what those text books do is obscure the historical connections between the discipline of psychology and psychoanalysis. If you go back and you look at some of the key figures that are important in psychology today, Piaget, Vygotsky for example, then you would see descriptions of those figures in psychology text books as if they had nothing to do with psychoanalysis and were rivals of psychoanalysis, whereas, in fact, part of the interesting historical work that we can do as critical psychologists is to show, for example, that Piaget trained as a psychoanalyst, practised as a psychoanalyst, gave papers at psychoanalytic congresses. That history has been obscured that Vygotsky was actively involved in the Russian psychoanalytical society, as was AR Luria. But these people are treated as if they were psychologists, as if they have nothing to do with psychoanalysis, which is treated by psychology as being the main example of an out-ofdate, non-scientific way of understanding people. And I think thats partly what makes it interesting. It raises the question, What is it that psychologists hate and fear about psychoanalysis? And just as we ask the question about other things that psychologists fear like sociology or philosophy, so we ask the question, What is it that psychologists hate and fear about psychoanalysis? I think one of the things that they hate and fear is the idea that theres something that escapes from the enterprise of prediction and control in psychology as a supposedly scientific discipline. Something of the unconscious and desire always will escape any attempt to trap it in experiments to define which are the confounding variables, and which are the independent variables, and which are the dependent variables.

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So theres something about psychoanalysis that is very threatening because of what it takes seriously as a foundation of its work: the unconscious. Theres something additionally threatening, which is the fact that psychology, say a hundred years ago, had very close connections with psychoanalysis, and psychologists find it very difficult to explain how that happens. For critical psychologists theres an additional problem, which is that many, as we would call critical psychologists or radical psychologist as they were called in the 1960s, 1970s, turned to psychoanalysis as an alternative to psychology. Ive always been careful not to get caught in psychoanalysis as a kind of evangelist for it as a complete alternative to psychology, and I think thats what led me to keep some distance from psychoanalysis for many years. I suppose I was always, in some sense, a critical psychologist from the beginning but I treated psychoanalysis with a great deal of caution. I did some work as a psychotherapist, an honorary psychotherapist in the National Health Service when I started teaching psychology, because I was teaching counselling as part of my teaching. I thought I needed to understand how it worked from the inside so I went to the NHS and was involved in seminars and meetings, and eventually did some work for them. And what changed it for you then? What changed for me was that what changed for me? Thats a very good question. It became apparent that there were different traditions in psychoanalysis that had been obscured by the mainstream of psychoanalysis. Now the mainstream psychoanalysis in Britain is the psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association, the IPA, which historically has tried to make an alliance with psychology in the form of *neuropsychology of course, quite explicitly but as an attempt to show itself to meet academic and scientific criteria. Psychoanalysis is in crisis and one of the ways that it tries to address that crisis is to show that it can pass the tests that are set it by the positivists. Thats particularly the case in the English speaking world. So the dominant tradition in psychoanalysis actually now functions as a kind of complement of the discipline of psychology where many psychoanalysts in the British tradition I say British tradition but I suppose I mean the dominant psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world because its in the United States as well as in Britain that many of these IPA psychoanalysts will try and tell a story about psychoanalysis as being concerned with developmental stages, empirically observable relationships between mothers and infants, the development of certain kind of pathologies that can be comprehended within the frame of the DSM and so on and so forth. There is an attempt to make psychoanalysis compatible with psychology. I think, actually, what it amounts to is an attempt to turn psychoanalysis into a kind of psychology. Depth psychology, some people call it depth psychology right? (Laughing) Yes, thats the way that psychologists would sometimes see it, depth psychology, yes, yes, which rather gives the game away. But while this movement has been happening in the English-speaking world as one attempt to address the crisis in psychoanalysis, there have been other

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ways of developing psychoanalysis that drew my attention. Ive mentioned two, one is group analysis, which has always had a more explicitly social view of the individual subject. There are group analysts who have been interested in Jungian analysis, for example; some have been interested in the work of Klein and *Bion; some have been interested in Lacan. And the other form of psychoanalysis is the Lacanian psychoanalysis, which from the 1980s in Britain, has established a presence, not only as a literary or academic curative work but also as a clinical tradition. And so there came a point in the early 1990s, where I wanted to understand better how psychoanalysis worked clinically, and I had to make a choice. I did an introductory course in group analysis and for a while I was wondering whether group analysis would be the way to go as an approach to as a way of comprehending the human subject as a social subject, as connecting, of embedding subjectivity in society that is anticipating in some way some of the interesting psychosocial work today. But Id also been working on Lacanian theory for some time. In fact, I had a chapter on Lacan in my PhD thesis and I decided that I would go with the Lacanian tradition and see how it worked. So, in a similar way to the way that I first got into psychology, to understand how it worked from the inside, I went into psychoanalysis to try and understand how it worked from the inside and thats still what Im interested in. How does psychoanalysis work from the inside as a clinical practice and the other side of the equation, which is also similar to the way that I understand psychology, how does psychoanalysis operate in society as a form of knowledge, which people accord power and which they either despise or love? And then we come to the psychosocial slowly. Youve mentioned your interest in understanding how the human functions as a social subject. So I think psychosocial studies in my understanding but we can have a conversation about that it actually puts that explicitly on the agenda. So it talks explicitly about power; it talks explicitly about affect. So, in what way do you think, does the psychosocial represents perhaps not a linear development, and yet a development from what mainstream psychoanalysis is or even clinical psychoanalysis is because psychoanalysis is a clinical practice so how is psychosocial different as a theory as well, as a practice? Well, I think psychosocial psychosocial is not one theory, is it? Psychosocial is a constellation of different theories, which revolve around this problematic, about subjectivity embedded in cultural social context. That constellation of theories includes psychoanalysis but not only psychoanalysis. There are different currents of psychosocial work that would be very critical of psychoanalytic attempts to describe subjectivity. Im thinking of the work using Deleuze, for example, but we can come back to that in a moment. Within the psychoanalytic approaches, there are many different varieties of psychoanalysis that have attempted to develop psychosocial studies and that would include psychoanalysis from the British tradition. Now, for all of the problems with psychoanalysis from the British tradition, it does, actually, take the unconscious seriously, and so theres always been some potential for using it in a critical way. And, of course, Lacan provides another way of taking psychosocial studies forward. Ive been interested in the Lacanian work partly because Im a Lacanian clinical practitioner but I think

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there are as deep problems in adopting the Lancanian standpoint in psychosocial studies as there are adopting a Kleinian standpoint in psychosocial studies. I wouldnt want to immediately privilege a Lacanian approach as the key to taking psychosocial studies forward. So I see psychosocial as a constellation of approaches and the best of the psychosocial work, I would see as another name for critical psychology, actually. I think for many people involved in psychosocial studies, it is a way of doing critical work. As you say, its a way of thinking about questions of power. And yet with sociologists being interested very strongly in the psychosocial studies, not without difficulties, nevertheless, we have psychologists and yes, we have psychoanalysts and thats the most interesting because I think the kind of relationship every relationship is very interesting but Im particularly interested in asking you what are your thoughts about the relationship of psychoanalysis and the psychosocial? Why do we need psychosocial if we have psychoanalysis being so radical, potentially? At least some aspects of psychoanalysis, schools of psychoanalysis, are very radical, you mentioned Deleuze, for example, Lacan even, or feminist psychoanalysis. What is then the need for the psychosocial? I dont think we need psychosocial as a way to solve the problems. I think it just has happened that psychosocial is one of the names for a space that exists now in which its possible to do some interesting, impressive work. If there wasnt that space, then we would be working in a space that was called, say, discourse analysis or a space that was maybe called feminist psychology. The term psychosocial gives a particular meaning as a signifier for that space, which is about the connection between the psychological and the social. But giving a name doesnt immediately solve a problem and I think there is a danger in thinking that that name psychosocial immediately solves the problem and dissolves the dualism that has historically structured the relationship between psychology and sociology. So that dualism still operates in the field of psychosocial studies where on the one hand, theres a progressive effect where psychologists are encouraged to talk to sociologists and to take sociological reasoning seriously and to think about their subject, that is, the subject of psychology as being historically constituted, as operating differently in different cultural contexts and thereby questioning the underlying assumption made by most psychologists, which is that youve got to unravel, youve got to reveal the underlying essential mental functioning of human beings universally. In that dialogue with sociologists, the other side of the coin is that theres a danger that sociologists become interested in psychology and for them the dynamic is different. For them, the dynamic can be that they treat the psychology as the little bit of the jigsaw that was missing from their big picture and they thereby reinforce the idea that there is something of the psychological that needs to be put into that picture, that needs to be worked on. As a consequence, there isnt a questioning of the psychology that theyre engaging with; rather, theres an attempt to bring that psychology into the equation so you have psychosocial as an equation, which brings together some of the works of psychology along with some sociology. Theres the danger. Of course, and yet, as you say, the truly psychosocial work, whether we call it that or not, has always been concerned with the mutually constituted individual and the social as being

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inextricably interwoven. Like Judith Butler, for example it would be an example of that work. Yes, I agree. Judith Butler would be a very good example of that. Well, you can then look at the way that psychoanalysis enters into that equation so that some of the psychologists take the same route as radical psychologists have historically taken, that is, that they see psychoanalysis as the solution to all of the problems that they face in their disciplines and then, just as radical psychologists did in the past, they turn to psychoanalysis and become evangelists for psychoanalysis. In the case of sociologists, I think the danger is even deeper, actually, because psychoanalysis seems to do psychology in a way that avoids the worst, most reductionist and positivist logics of psychology, and some sociologists do seem bewitched by the claims of psychoanalysis to be doing something that is different to psychology. Right. So I have a more specific question just staying with the same subject of the influence of psychoanalysis on the psychosocial. So the development of psychosocial studies has been diverse, as you said and some people who are influential in that field, like Steven Frosh have actually defined psychosocial as, for example, combining discursive psychology, Deleuzian philosophy and phenomenology. Now, of course, we can argue about that definition but what do you think about it? Is this an appropriate mix or is that and should we be going for a mix in the first place? Well, its one definition of psychosocial studies. Its a definition that I like but its a little bit of a wish fulfilment in that it sets out an agenda for what psychosocial studies should be. Were actually in a real academic situation here where there are competing visions of what psychosocial studies should be, attempts to reduce psychosocial studies to the level of to a psychoanalytic world view. But as an agenda, that definition of psychosocial is fine, I like it. What about Lacan? Where does he fit into the picture? Give me the definition again (laughing). All right discursive psychology, Deleuzian philosophy and phenomenology. Thats okay. But where is Lacan? Lacan would would be everywhere, everywhere! He is everywhere. Lacan could span those three different approaches very well. I mean, with respect to discursive psychology, weve always had a question in discursive psychology about what the subject of discursive psychology is. Now, for sure, the subject of discursive psychology is not the

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psychological subject as they appear in laboratory experiments. The subject of discursive psychology, as a subject that is constituted in discourse is, you could say, the Lacanian subject. Mhm, of course, youve been saying that (laughing). Yes, I have been saying that and there has been something of a battle in discursive psychology between those who would want to take discursive psychology along an empiricists route, that would refuse to countenance any notion of the unconscious and those who would see discursive psychology as an opening to thinking about the nature of the subject in relation to language, which includes a relation to forms of language that escape its conscious grasp. Now, once you take that seriously, then youre in something very close to Lacan. There were three components Deleuze and phenomenology. Well, Deleuze Im not terribly keen on Deleuze but I think the reason is because Im not terribly keen on Deleuzians, those who simply repeat phrases from Deleuze and treat it as a complete system of knowledge or a world view, whereas, in fact, Deleuze was very close to psychoanalysis, writing with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, for example. I find it difficult to understand why Anti-Oedipus as a book is treated as anti-psychoanalytic. Its a critique of normalising, pathologising mainstream psychoanalytic practice, for sure, but it accords very well with a more open form of psychoanalysis, of which I see Lacan as being a prime exponent Oh, totally. and its not surprising hmm? Totally and Guattari in particular ... and Guattari particularly and thats why Guattari is cut off and treated, you know, like the bad, you know, Engels figure, you know, to Deleuze as the good *Marx. But Lacan apparently called Deleuze one day to his office and said to him, We could use people like you. Which isnt a very nice invitation, but I think it indicates something of the interest that Lacan had in Deleuze, and of the breadth of approach which is Lacanian psychoanalysis as including people like Deleuze and people like Bracha Ettinger and a variety of different theorists in what we could call the widest Freudian field that is not something which is fixated on one particular individual, not particularly or Jacques Lacan. And with respect to the third: although Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a critique of phenomenology in its most simplistic form, there is a deep connection between Lacanian psychoanalysis and phenomenology, despite Lacans attempt to differentiate himself from Hegel, for example. Hegel is incredibly important to the development of Lacanian theory Oh, no doubt about it.

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So I would say, with respect to each of these elements, discursive psychology, Deleuze and phenomenology, I would say Lacan has something to say about these. Hes present there in some way in each of these three elements so maybe we could say that the definition that Frosh gives could be a little bit broader, it could include feminists It should. ... the theory it brings up. Like I say, even within that limited tripartite definition, we could work with it. Absolutely and from what youve said, actually, the problem is really with some Deleuzians as opposed to Deleuze as, I may expand it, with Lacanians, especially in our field, you know? When I see another paper about lack, I want to scream, oh not again, I am going to throw up (laughing) because of the way this concept is deployed as a key that opens all the doors. Lacan was not for opening the doors, in general, never mind with one key, actually, dont you think? Okay. Kate has a very specific question for you; shes an avid reader of your work, obviously. So, your 2010 article for the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, where you usefully problematise the use of psychoanalysis in social research, noting that clinical psychoanalytical work is distinct from social research in some important ways. In the intervening years, we have seen a proliferation of studies that bring together psychoanalysis and social research. Now, how do you feel? Have the warnings and caveats reflected in your article been heeded by scholars? No, I dont think so. Well, one of the points that I make in that article is that one of the key concepts that is used in clinical work, that of transference, is then taken and used as the basis for thinking about the reflexivity of the researcher in psychosocial research, to think about the way that transference enters into subjectivity of the researcher in the form of countertransference, to make the point that this transference is something which is really quite specific to the clinical situation, that transference happens as a function of the very strange situation in which one subject speaks to another about some of the most intimate, personal things that have happened to them and that they fantasise about; not in the form of a conversation and with very little direct response from their interlocutor. This peculiar situation is something that gives rise to something that we then conceptualise as countertransference. In that article, I show what the specific qualities of that clinical situation are that give rise to transference, and how it differs from the research relationship. That throws into question the use of this motif to understand reflexivity in research outside the clinic. But I also look at why it might be that the psychosocial researcher could imagine that theres something going on in the clinic that they need to take seriously, and why it might be that they cant see that that clinical situation is very specific and very peculiar. And Im not the only one that makes this point about the clinic as being the place where transference appears. Theres a long tradition in Lacanian psychoanalytic work which makes this point and a recent interview, published in the Concept and Form, Second Volume, reprinting articles from the Cahiers Pour Lanalyse interview with Alain Badiou,, makes exactly

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the same point; the clinical situation is the place where psychoanalytic phenomena are produced and thats what Lacan and Lacanians have been concerned with. But we have to ask again, or we have to look again at the questions that I raised in that article about the, we could say and I use this in inverted commas a transference that many psychosocial researchers have to psychoanalysis. I point out that it might be because there is unresolved transference for some of the researchers who have been in psychoanalysis themselves so that they then treat it as operating in the outside world, the world around them, including in their research. It might be because they want to believe that psychoanalysis is true as a complete system of thought that can explain everyday life. But Im sure youll agree with what Ferenczi said about transference and countertransference as kind of a universal phenomenon, that is not to say that we can work with that except when in the clinical situation? You see, I would go further and I would say that if we really want good psychosocial analysis of subjectivity and power, then we need something more than the very limited frame of psychoanalysis to understand how it is that people become emotionally trapped in relations with others. And thats where some of the Deleuzian work, I think, is very interesting because Deleuze gives a different Deleuzians give a different language for conceptualising the play of affect and power, which doesnt reduce it to a psychoanalytic frame. Totally, and doesnt pathologise that, basically, because the danger with psychoanalysis has always been, even for us who believe in psychoanalysis, to treat it as an open system and not a complete one. Another issue is the asymmetry of power between the analyst and the analysand. It is a huge issue that has been questioned from so many perspectives but also, there is something voluntary in the relationship in the clinical situation that well the analysand accepts the disproportion of power, even in the Lacanian context, I would argue. So I think were in a danger of not only actually trivialising and simplifying it but actually, deploying this whole idea of transference quite wrongly. Yes, theres a comment by Jacques Alan Miller somewhere where he says that for there to be psychoanalysis, there already has to be transference and I think thats true. I think for psychoanalysis to work, the analysand has already to have some kind of transference to psychoanalysis and to, at some level, to some degree, to some intensity has to believe that its going to work and that there's some point in sitting in a room and talking about themselves to someone else that they dont know. Of course. But the other side of that is that the psychoanalysis wont work if the subject doesnt have a transference to it and I think there are many subjects in our world, in the past and even today, there are many subjects who dont have a transference to psychoanalysis and there are other ways of understanding their distress and comprehending what it is to be a subject.

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You see, in that sense Im not an evangelist for psychoanalysis. I believe that it works, otherwise I wouldnt practise as an analyst but I believe that it works for those who have made the bet that it will work for them. So what does it mean for social researchers? Well, actually, first of all, they may not be people who have transference to psychoanalysis (a), and (b) when they work with their research subjects, its a different tacit contract that they have with the research subject. Whats the usefulness of transference for social researchers, is there any? Well, I think the problem is that for researchers who have become fascinated with psychoanalysis, they may then use the notion of countertransference to work on their own subjectivity, to work on their own reflexive engagement with people that theyre interviewing or doing ethnographic research with or whatever. But I think we have to treat that work that theyre doing and its important work we have to treat that work that theyre doing as transference to psychoanalysis. We have to reinterpret what it is that theyre actually doing as they try and understand their relationship with their subjects, with their participants. The danger is that because they treat it as a form of countertransference, they arent able to problematise it. Exactly, and you may end up in a situation when you speak to your students about psychoanalysis and you have feeling that it does something to them. Our ethics then should be to say at the outset, that its not going to be a clinical session perhaps but this this is an introduction to psychoanalysis in the clinical context? Yes, yes. The danger is that when its talked about as countertransference, it presumes that there is already a transference to them on the part of their participants and I think thats the bit that we need to treat with a great deal of suspicion because yes, it might be that some participants in these studies are also invested in psychoanalysis but many of them arent. And in a way, it goes back to some of the aspects of critical psychology that I was interested in when I started as a psychologist, which is that psychology as a discipline has a great deal of power in society today because psychological ideas have become so pervasive. But there are still many places in society where psychological ideas have not penetrated and we need to take those seriously without pathologising them and, indeed, without psychologising them. Totally, and never mind what happens in other cultures. Yes. As you spoke, Foucault came to mind, really, because when you look at psychoanalysis as an ideology, or the discourse of psychoanalysis and what does it do in society, it is like the discourse of psychology, that you have mentioned at the beginning isnt it? Yes, yes.

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Its quite interesting because then one can see from the perspective of an ideological discourses, which psychoanalysis and the psychosocial studies even, are at the same time, all the time, arent they? Yes. I wonder Im not a great Foucauldian by the way but I just kind of was wondering Well, I am a great Foucauldian Oh, you are, alright thats alright, I thought that not surprisingly, how Foucault came into the conversation! Actually, when I first started as a psychology student, I was also involved in political activism and I One of the things I was involved with was a group called Sex-Pol. It was a student society which specifically drew on the work of Wilhelm Reich. Because even at that early point, I was very, very attracted to Wilhelm Reich, his work as a Marxist and psychoanalyst, trying to understand how it was that people were immiserated, immiserated at a very deep level by capitalism and what the possibilities were for mobilising people to rebel against that immiseration and to understand how it is that repression worked at the very deep level. Okay, so we set up the Sex-Pol Society and one of the problems that we had was getting people to join it and one of the problems that we had in getting people to join it was that people didnt want to talk about their sexuality; thats something that was repressed. And I only understood, I think I only understood why we had that problem when I read Foucault. You know, the project of setting up a Reichian sex-pol group actually was inciting a form of discourse rather than tapping into something that was already repressed that simply needed to be released. Foucault helped me to see how it was that psychoanalysis operated as part of the apparatus of power alongside psychology. Thats why, in critical psychology, from the very earliest point, weve been interested in the notion of the psy-complex as a collection of theories and practices that include psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, popular self-help yes, because there are two sides of the equation in Foucault as well. One is the discipline and surveillance, and the other is the confession, the incitement to speak and to believe that if you speak about your deepest, most hidden desires, then youll be free. Of course, Foucault shows us that that incitement to speak is a trap and the more you speak, the more you believe theres something else that should be said, and you become more enmeshed with power, the more you speak about yourself as an individual subject. And thats where Lacan comes in (laughing) I think. Yes, the difference is that Foucault is particularly concerned with dangers of speaking within a hermeneutic frame where you give deeper meaning to each production of speech; you give a deeper meaning to what you have said that is lying behind, or is the reason for why youve said something, and what Lacan does is to treat speech as a collection of signifiers, not as something to be hermeneutically interpreted. The endpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as he puts it in the end of Seminar XI, is to arrive at pure difference, which I interpret, as I understand, as being

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what he says elsewhere, as reducing signifiers to nonsense, that the subject as theyre speaking in Lacanian psychoanalysis doesnt uncover a deeper truth within them but comes to understand that the signifiers that theyve privileged as the markers of their identity are contingent, that are nonsensical. We give meanings to them. Yes. Socially, so to speak, and its even more interesting that Judith Butler who I really, really like very much, she actually tried well, not to do a grand synthesis but actually tried to engage Foucault and Lacan in her work, as you well know, in Life of Power. But I think the great thing about Butler is precisely that she doesnt try to synthesise things into one scheme. Shes very eclectic, shes very tactical. Shell take elements of different theoretical frameworks and use them against each other to show how they operate. Thats it. Shes a philosopher. Oh, totally and besides, she does actually believe in openness of signification Yes, yes. Thats kind of one of her key contributions, if anything Yes. And I think this is made possible through engaging Foucault with Lacan, I do think so, actually. So that opens up a new possibility for re-signification, I would even say so it gives us a possibility to articulate, you know, your leftist politics, if we are of that project as we both are, I presume. Right, so I have another question for you. Our book really focuses on the role of affect and how affect escapes significations as well as representation.. So what do you think, actually, of this concept? Whats the possibility, the potentiality that this concept has for understanding contemporary organisations, because there is something very seductive but also something very important, of contemporary importance, if I can put it so, that is of potential relevance to the whole aspect of organisation and organising? So then again, affect is actually used in many ways in psychosocial studies and what is your personal view on the multiple and the collective definition of affect in contemporary psychosocial studies? Affect after all is a dangerous thing, isnt it? Yes.

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So Im assuming one could go, of course, with Deleuze himself as you have already mentioned and so did many other people. I think whats the most useful about it is that it gives us a different way of speaking about what? Feeling? But it gives us a way of speaking about that which is very different from emotion and, of course, emotion defines what we feel in terms of given categories in which the names for the feelings are treated as fixed. As if you can map them into commonsensical language, which, of course, is were then in the domain of ideology. And the logic of measurement, never mind measurements (laughing) And of course (laughing) psychology yes You have scales. And you have scales for measuring. Yes, and what affect does is it gives us a different way of conceptualising that precisely as you said, to escape those categories and to open different spaces for feeling our ways in relation to each other and in relation to the organisations that we inhabit. So what it calls for, I think, the study of affect calls for a different a proliferation of vocabularies to articulate how affect is operating in the organisations. I think that is why, to an extent, psychoanalysis is useful because it provides a different vocabulary. But thats where Deleuze is also useful because it gives us a quite different vocabulary for conceptualising what affect is, and the way that dominant notions of affect territorialise and re-territorialise our understanding. Well, you have answered all my questions and I have really enjoyed myself listening to you. [NOT INCLUDED: End of interview It sounded like rubbish to me (laughing). What will happen now, Ill send it for transcription and let you have perhaps I made the long questions but I wont edit anything youve said and Ill let you have a look at it and edit anything you might want to Oh! Im happy for you to turn it into something that is comprehensible. Yes, I hope well do some work with Kate on this (Laughing) Well thank you very much once more, yes. Its been a great pleasure to talk to you and yes and youll hear from us soon and well send you the book ]