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Jean-Philippe Deranty
ABSTRACT This article aims to present some of the main results of contem-
porary French psychodynamics of work. The writings of Christophe Dejours
constitute the central references in this area. His psychoanalytical approach,
which is initially concerned with the impact of contemporary work practices
on individual health, has implications that go well beyond the narrow psycho-
pathological interest. The most significant theoretical development to have come
out of Dejourss research is that of Yves Clot, whose writings will constitute
the second reference point in this article. The article attempts to demonstrate
that the thick definition of work that Dejours and Clot operate with, as a result
of their focus on its psychological function, speaks directly, in substantial and
critical ways, to all disciplines with an interest in work, to philosophers, social
theorists and social scientists, including economic theorists.
KEYWORDS Yves Clot Christophe Dejours psychoanalysis work
REAL
EGO OTHERS
The Ego-Real axis indicates the moment of the act properly speaking.
This is indeed an instrumental moment. However, seen from the perspec-
tive of the subject, it is more precisely the moment where the subject in
action faces the challenges of the instrumental task. There is never full trans-
parency between instrumental prescriptions and the subject putting them in
practice. This dimension that is true of all technical activity is most notably
true of the work activity.
The Real-Others axis denotes the efficiency of the act, an efficiency
that is instrumental of course, but also defined socially inasmuch as the effi-
ciency of the subjects act cannot be left to the sole judgement of the acting
subject. Efficiency is not an absolutely objective predicate, even if there are
strong objective constraints to it, but the product of a social judgement. This
does not amount to a culturalist dissolution of instrumental rationality. The
objective constraints are indeed very strong. But it is equally abstract to
believe that instrumental rationality simply imposes itself on the human agent
independent of the social context. The notion of instrumental judgement
brings together the two dimensions of instrumental constraints and socially
formed and socially imposed judgement. When technical activity is refined
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as work activity, that is, when the economic dimension is included, the
judgement of efficiency is doubled: beyond the purely technical dimension,
made concrete in the end product or the service provided, and measured by
productivity and quality, there is the utilitarian efficiency, the value created
by the technical act, its response to a social demand. This is the instrumen-
tality resulting from the profit motive: what was the social demand that trig-
gered the production process?
Finally, the intersubjective relation is the side of the tradition (Mauss),
the cultural moment of technique, since a technique that would not be
accepted in and defined through a culture would not make sense and would
not be seen to produce technical effects. Equally important in technique is
the dimension of its transmission, which is unconceivable if technique is not
also considered as a social practice. The specification of the activity, from
general technical to a work activity embedded in the economy, puts the
focus on the importance of the work collective. Indeed, the working subject
is socially integrated, first through the general division of labour, and more
specifically through the use of culturally defined techniques, through his or
her intervention in a specific technical world. But the cultural element of
work is also a third, more specific one. It points to the restricted yet highly
significant community of the work collective, the community of subjects who
are related on the basis of their knowledge and skill, the special knowledge
of the specific techniques involved, which no outsider can truly fathom.
Here, Dejours argues (2002: 60), the judgement on work is a judgement of
beauty: the acknowledgement of the quality of the activity and its end product
can only be brought about by the peers.
The point made by Clot bears similar traits to the German concept of
Leistungsprinzip. The decisive references, however, are no longer the social
behaviourist Mead, or contemporary sociology, but two classical authors in
French psychology, Henri Wallon (1930, 1947) and Ignace Meyerson (1948,
1987). Like Honneth, Clot establishes a strong connection between norma-
tivity, subjective well-being and the subjects inscription in the division of
social labour. By contrast with Honneth, however, Clot emphasizes the
material mediations through which this inscription is effectuated, and how
they impact on subjective well-being. Clot argues that the depersonalizing
aspects of work are not necessarily alienating in the pathological sense of the
term, but can also play a structuring role for the subject. He renders this idea
by playing on the different meanings of occupation: by losing herself in the
working activity, the subject can deal in new ways with her pre-occupations,
the existential and psychological content of subjective life that preoccupies
but also literally precedes or lies outside the occupation. Here Clot follows
closely the work of the psychologists of work organizations Curie and Dupuy
(1994). Because of its depersonalizing logic, due to the objective constraints
that are indifferent to the subjects idiosyncratic personality structure, work
forces a rearrangement of psychological life, which is not necessarily detri-
mental but can also be a source of subjective liberation. Work from that
perspective is seen normatively as a potential educating factor as it forces
upon the subject the challenge of facing objective constraints and the highly
specific social constraints associated with them (orders, demands, expecta-
tions, and so on). We might speculate that the psychological function of work
consists in the rupture it introduces between the personal preoccupations of
the subject and the social occupations he or she is required to accomplish
(2004: 65).
The subject is taken outside of herself through the work activity, but
this distance put between the self and her immediate physiological and affec-
tive life is not necessarily an alienation in the pathological sense; it can well
be an important, indeed a necessary, step in self-realization. This is a process
that can allow for an increase in self-distantiation and reflexivity. The self-
forgetting that is made possible through the use of tools, the constraints of
technical prescriptions and work processes can be a process of Bildung.
If we focus further on the social dimension attached to the objective
constraints, similar arguments can be made; a potentially positive alienation
can occur. By working, the subject is forced to leave the idiosyncracy of
subjective life and the intimacy of family life and is thrown into wider society.
She or he takes place in the division of labour. It is precisely the fact that
this social dimension is tightly attached to objective imperatives obeying a
functional logic that can have a liberating aspect. If the rules governing the
social world qua economic are objective, this can represent a liberation
from other social worlds structured around norms that can be, in some cases,
more rigid or inegalitarian. The strong functional and instrumental dimen-
sions of the subjects contribution to the division of labour, the fact that their
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work is all the more invested by subjects. They ask of work a lot more than
before. In particular, they demand of it to become a milieu where these lives
can be invented. Work is therefore less at the centre and paradoxically more
at the centre. (2004: 70)
Below the general social level, Yves Clot emphasizes a second fascin-
ating aspect of the depersonalizing aspect of work with important structuring
dimensions. This is the subjective aspect of work relating to the specificity
of a profession: the highly specialized ethicality of a professional milieu that
fuses the intersubjective and the technical. Clot (2004: 348) argues that the
best way to approach this reality of the subject at work is by paralleling it
with the importance of rhetorical genres in language use as demonstrated
by Bakhtin. In his criticism of Saussure, Bakhtin showed that language use
was not well explained only through the classical dichotomy of language and
speech. The missing element in this dichotomy is the social: the individual
use of language is made possible by the recourse to socially defined schemes,
the genres of discourse. The genres are highly effective structures that allow
communication between individuals to occur by mobilizing a complex array
of social and communicative assumptions that never have to become explicit,
unless communication breaks down and the rules and structures of the genres
have to be reflected upon. The genre pre-determines the choice of vocab-
ulary, tone, style, grammar, and so on. Because it is a complex, structured
scheme that is shared by all in the community of language, the genre of
discourse allows for a highly efficient performance of communicative action
as it coordinates the different perspectives with a minimum of actual, explicit
exchange.
The actual exchange of signs is minimal for a maximum of commu-
nicative efficiency. Similarly, the ergonomic studies quoted and the studies
performed by Clot himself demonstrate the vital importance of genres of
activity in work places. The genre of activity is an informal mode of action
coordination that is essential for the actual, effective instrumental action to
be successful. The mechanical application of technical rules would lead to
the interruption or a dramatic slowing down of the production process. Only
the implicit rules, forms of behaviour, types of inter-individual coordinations,
can fluidify the rigid production processes imposed from outside. A whole
universe of unwritten professional rules makes the application of explicit
rules work. The importance of this type of intersubjective, largely embodied
mode of cooperation is massively confirmed by interactionist cognitive science
(Hutchins, 1995).
The professional genres of activity are a fusion of technical constraint
and social interaction. They are determined by the material production process
and the economic aims, but they form a highly specific professional milieu.
Such milieus are highly hermetic, closed to the outside, because they are
formed around highly specialized skills that can only be acquired by the
working subjects through apprenticeship and a long, intimate frequentation
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machine, the working subject indirectly yet irreducibly engages with many
other social individuals: the makers of the machine, the individuals who
commanded the construction of the machine, the engineers and maintenance
workers understanding the inner workings of the machine, the other users
of the machine engaged in the same genre of activity, the workers down-
stream relying on the finished product for their operations, etc. There is no
profession, even in those involving mainly emotional work, that does not
involve the use of material objects in which social relations are solidified.
However, as Clot says, despite its strong instrumental and social over-
determination, no technical object carries its mode of functioning on its face.
Its proper use has to be learnt, just as much as the belonging to a profes-
sional group by the mastery of a genre of activity involves a learning process.
The question of personal style re-emerges here, the dialectic of impersonality
and personal style. Every worker engages with the objects, tools and machines
of his or her workplace differently, despite the often highly constraining
aspect of instrumental objects and procedures. Indeed, this is one of the worst
aspects of Taylorist work: to have made the individual appropriation of objec-
tive work processes so difficult, indeed to have wilfully intended to make
them unattainable for working subjects.
whatever, in the world, lets itself be known through its resistance to technical
mastery and scientific knowledge. In other words, the real is that element that
makes technique fail when all the resources of technique have been correctly
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used. The real . . . is that which exists in the world and escapes us and becomes
in turn an enigma to be deciphered. (2002: 401)
The real is not necessarily the material in the sense of the Sartrian in-
itself. It is whatever resists the accomplishment of the task. It is the element
that separates the task to be done from the activity that actually does it. Often,
the real is purely social. Dejours, for example, highlights the fact that work
organizations can regularly be counter-productive, overly complex to the point
of self-contradiction, that the prescriptions, the rules and regulations, the
technical procedures governing work processes often contain contradictory
or counter-productive elements that make the activity of workers more rather
than less difficult. In such cases, the real is of direct social origin. But in
all cases, something resists the efforts of working subjects when they attempt
to apply the rules that have been defined to achieve productive ends.
The discovery of the gap between the prescriptive and the real leads
to the redefinition of work as working, that is to say, as the activity demanded
of the subject in order for the prescribed task to be accomplished despite
the prescribed rules being obstructed by unforeseen events and disruptions.
The redefinition of work as working is based on the premise that the risk
of failure is an irreducible element of work: the instrumental ends can be
achieved only when all the social and material obstacles that came in the
way of the technical procedures have been circumvented. From the psycho-
logical perspective, work consists in the personal investment demanded of
the subject to bridge the gap between the prescriptive and the real.
What emerges as the main feature of working . . . is that, even when the work
is well conceived, even when the organization of work is rigorous, even when
the instructions and procedures are clear, it is impossible to achieve quality if
the orders are scrupulously respected. Indeed, ordinary work situations are rife
with unexpected events, breakdowns, incidents, operational anomalies, organ-
izational inconsistency and things that are simply impossible to predict, arising
from the materials, tools, and machines as well as from other workers, colleagues,
bosses, subordinates, the team, the chain of authority, the clients, and so on.
In short, there is no such thing as purely mechanical work. (2007a: 72)
The focus on the part that the subject must necessarily bring to work
means that there is no mechanical work. Even the most Taylorized form of
work involves some participation and adaptation on the part of the subject.
This leads to a general point: against the widespread diagnosis of the de-
materialization of social worlds, and notably of the world of work, a diag-
nosis that gives the impression that contemporary (working) subjects are
now engaged only in pure cognitive, affective and communicative exchanges,
the psychology of work shows that subjects continue to be engaged massively
with the resistance of the material world. Furthermore, the insistence on the
active engagement of working subjects means that all work is to some extent
theoretical and practical at the same time. Theoretical because it involves, to
some degree, a reflexive adaptation to the contingent changes and challenges
of the performance of the task, and practical because the entire person is
involved in the performance of the task. The key term used by Dejours to
encapsulate this aspect of working is that of practical intelligence. All intel-
ligence in a work situation is practical, and all practice is forced to be intel-
ligent, because of the adaptation demanded by the real.
One obvious objection to this approach, with its emphasis on the subjec-
tive investment demanded of workers, is that it bears no significance for other
disciplines since it simply focuses on the subjective experience of an activity
that can also be objectively described, and especially one that can be quan-
tified for the purpose of calculation and prediction as in economic theory.
However, the focus on work as a subjective activity brings to light elements
that are not just elements of work as a mere subjective experience but of
work as such, of its very ontology, so to speak. This is the deepest sense
of the theory of the real and of the challenge to the subjects efforts to realize
the prescription. The key conclusion to be drawn from the gap between the
prescriptive and the real is that if the prescribed organization of work is
followed to the letter, the end product, its desired quality or quantity, will
not be achieved. This is in fact exactly what happens in forms of strike that
make a point of following every rule (a grve du zle in French). The subjec-
tive investment is an irreducible and necessary moment in the work process.
Without subjective mobilization, no production is possible.
Employers and managers have known this since there has been a
division of labour. No work is possible without the active involvement of the
workers, not for the trivial reason that one needs workers to do the work,
but because one needs practically intelligent workers, even in seemingly
unintelligent work, for the production process to be efficient at all. This in-
sight has tremendous critical implications for theoretical and applied discip-
lines that use overly formal or abstract definitions of work as, for example,
neoclassical economics. First, it implies that without taking into account the
necessary part played by subjective activity, one cannot truly account for
production itself and for productivity. In particular, it becomes impossible
to give a theoretical account of what matters most to economics: namely, the
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This new element arising from the definition of work at first seems to
contradict the previous point about the importance of subjective investment.
Prescribed rules and processes do not carry their application on their fore-
head. They must be learnt, appropriated, mastered individually by each
subject. This requires a work of personal interpretation and adaptation. More
importantly, the resistance of the real means that the subject can perform
the task only by stepping out of the tradition and the norm. Because the
prescriptive aspect of the labour process is not sufficient to achieve the task,
the subject is forced to trick the real: he or she is forced to find the resources
in his or her practical intelligence to cheat the material and social resistance.
The subjective involvement in the task therefore leads at first to the radical
solitude of the producer. This irreducibly individual aspect of the applica-
tion of rules and processes carries with it the risk of being incompatible with
other activities, when the group is considered. An individual solution to a
specific problem can become an obstacle if it obstructs the strategies of the
other workers or of the whole group. This is why, Dejours argues, coordin-
ation from above can never be sufficient, and the real performance of work
always relies on horizontal cooperation.
Such cooperation, Dejours argues, is impossible without some minimal
normative requirements. The coordination of actions in the work situation
is dependent on the establishment of cooperation amongst workers. As with
Clots notion of a genre of activity, Dejourss key point is again that real
work requires a common framework of understanding that is simultaneously
of technical-instrumental and of a normative-intersubjective nature, a frame
that allows for a basic form of understanding to take place, without which
actions could not be coordinated.
What Dejours emphasizes more than Clot is the communicative moment
in cooperation. The analogies with Habermas are fully appropriate: through
the notion of genre, Clot describes the professional world as a lifeworld, whilst
Dejours insists on the communicative practices that take place within such
lifeworlds and make the work cooperation possible. The irony, of course,
is that the action in question is now an instrumental one. As Dejours shows
(2002: 629; 2007a: 82), since the work process requires cooperation between
workers, it functions best if the individualized forms of subjective investment
that allow for the mastering of the task are confronted and discussed in a
public forum, where a consensus can hopefully be found on the best way
to realize the production. The communication at play obeys similar norma-
tive constraints as public discourse in general: via the justification of claims
through valid arguments acceptable to all and the publicizing of effective pro-
ductive methods, which requires a basic trust amongst the agents involved
in the production project.
This is quite an ironic twist. Dejours uses Habermass theory of commu-
nicative action to highlight dimensions of work that disappeared in Habermass
dualistic analysis of the forms of action. Dejours and Clot after him were thus
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able to identify the essential normative moments that are required in instru-
mental action for its success. The analytical distinction between instrumental
and communicative action is a dangerous simplification if it is interpreted in
a reified way: for instrumental ends to be coordinated, an essential norma-
tive component is required. A similar point directed at other classical philo-
sophical definitions of work, like that of Arendt, could be made. Dejours
manages to demonstrate that all work, including the most mechanical, is
never reducible to poiesis or techne, that is, to an action obeying pure
instrumental rules, but always constitutes also a form of praxis, insofar as it
involves the whole ethical character of the individual, relies on coordination
and cooperation, and necessitates fundamental ethical norms, like trust and
the symmetrical exchange of justifiable arguments (1998: 180).
An important consequence of this definition of work from a psycho-
logical perspective is the role played by recognition in it. This is only a
consequence of the overall model, not in itself a part of the definition, but
a significant consequence nonetheless. Dejourss theory of the subject insists
on the structuring dimension of suffering at the core of subjectivity and
especially of subjectivity at work (1998: 181; 2003: 14951; 2007b). If working
in its concrete sense means bringing about the productive ends by circum-
venting the obstacles to the application of prescriptions, then work is essen-
tially an experience that puts the subject in question: work in the concrete
sense is the experience of the failure of rules and regulations, it is a chal-
lenge to the subjects capacity to innovate and trick the resistance of the
material and the social; it is often an affront to personal physical and psycho-
logical abilities, in any case always a challenge to the identity of the subject.
Since the prescribed rules show their limitations, work is also always an
experience on the verge of the illegal, always a form of cheating with the
rules. All of this makes work an experience that is structurally inducing of
suffering. But as we saw, it is in cooperation that the task can actually be
performed and the individual resources put to the task acknowledged. It is
therefore precisely through this recognition of the subjects contribution that
the suffering necessarily involved in work can be sublimated into pleasure,
i.e. in a subjectivity or identity-enhancing experience:
the sense of suffering depends on recognition. When the quality of my work
is recognised, all my efforts, angst, doubts, disappointments, discouragements
become full of meaning. All that suffering had not been in vain; not only has
it contributed to the division of labour, but it has made me, in return, a different
subject from the one I was before recognition. The recognition of work, or
indeed of the product of work, can be repatriated by the subject in the
construction of his or her identity. . . . Without the benefice of recognition of
his or her work, and failing the power to thereby access the meaning of his
or her lived relation to work, the subject faces his or her own suffering, and
it alone. (Dejours, 1998: 37)
Notes
1. See the exhaustive presentation of the psychodynamics of work by Molinier
(2006), who insists in particular on the strong interdisciplinarity characterizing
Dejourss project.
2. See Daniellou (2004) for a presentation of Wisners important contributions to
ergonomics.
05 Deranty 105484R 1/7/09 11:12 pm Page 86
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