The show in the restaurant: performing affective labor through culinary fantasies in Istanbul

Abstract

In this thesis, I aim to make a contribution to the post-Fordist literature by exploring the neo-liberal transformation in the fine-dining sector in 2000s in Istanbul in order to rethink the concepts of immaterialization of labor and affective labor through Lacan. I psychoanalytically investigate the blurring of the boundary between work and enjoyment, a phenomenon explored in different terms in the post-Fordist literature, as immaterialization. Based on my ethnographic research in Istanbul, I offer a psychoanalytically informed analysis of this transformation, which refers to the blurring of the boundary between work and enjoyment. I suggest that this blurring emanates from the restructuring of the social imaginary with the fantasy of culinary work as art that constructs work as the primary object of desire. This research also investigates incorporation of a new architectural space called the show kitchen in the dining room, which provides the material conditions for cooks to perform their job as a form of art and identify with their representation as artists. To conclude, this thesis, which is in pursuit of enjoyment in the Lacanian sense of the term, claims that the key to understand both reproduction and displacement of post-Fordism is to conceptualize enjoyment as a dimension of affective labor as well as taking affective investments into consideration, as they are constitutive of the laborer subjectivity.