In 1978, Lefty Rosenthal—a former Chicago bookmaker—became Director of Entertainment at the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.  Financed by Teamsters’ pension money, the Stardust was “owned” by Allen Glick.  Despite Glick’s ostensible ownership, the Stardust was part of the gambling operations of La Cosa Nostra.  Rosenthal was the mob’s “inside man” at the Stardust, but Rosenthal is Jewish and, thus, “could never be a member of the organization [La Cosa Nostra]” and did not need to abide by the protocol of La Cosa Nostra (Pileggi 1995: 43).   Roemer, in his book about Vegas, says, “Lefty had traveled a road paved with controversy and dispute.  I guess you could say Lefty was representative of Las Vegas”  (1994: 111).   Martin Scorsese immortalized Rosenthal, aka Ace, by filming his story.  The film, Casino, was billed as the story of “how the mob lost its control of the neon moneymaking machine it created” and as a love story:  a “romantic love triangle” among Rosenthal, Rosenthal’s friend (the mobster Tony Spilotro), and Rosenthal’s wife.
 What makes the Rosenthal story interesting and relevant to organizational theory?  We intend to analyze whether Lefty is “representative” of Las Vegas, and in doing so, we examine the issue of representation.  Specifically, we analyze the story, as told by Roemer (1994) and Pileggi (1995), from a historical point of view and, then, from a Jungian archetypal point of view. However, we would like to revise Jung, and following the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari (1972/ 1977), we will revise Jung to account for the material genealogy of Las Vegas.
 The paper proceeds as follows.  After defining the issue of representation, we discuss the historical story and Jungian archetypal psychology, then view the Roemer (1994) and Pileggi (1995) stories of Rosenthal through the lens of archetypal psychology.  Next, we discuss the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari (1972/ 1977) and view the stories of Rosenthal through the lens of a revisionist psychology.  We conclude by commenting upon the “demise of representation” (Knights 1997) and its implications for organizational theory.
Representation
 Knights, citing Benhabib (1992), has commented upon the “‘demise of an episteme of representation’”  (1997: 1). We consider two problems identified by Knights.  One problem is dualistic thinking.  Dualisms  (for example, mind and body, men and women, individual and society, micro and macro phenomena) tend to privilege one term:  e.g., the mind is usually privileged over the body and men are usually privileged over women.  A second problem associated with the episteme of representation is reification.  Knights explains this second problem, as follows:
“What has come to be defined as the problem of dualism occurs when . . . ‘this’ or ‘that’ is reified as an ontological reality rather than merely a provisional, subjectively significant, and hence contestable, ordering of ‘thing’.  Dualistic theorizing, then, commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness since it believes that the distinctions made as part of ordering ‘reality’ or organizing the world are accurate or true representations of a reality beyond, and as if it were independent of, the theorist” (1997: 3-4).

Knights’ critique of representation is amplified by Holland (1999) in his introduction to the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guatarri.   As explained by Holland, a signifier—such as Oedipus—and its signified—the Oedipus Complex—say nothing about the referent (1999: 37).  In other words, Freud’s Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex say nothing about their referent, which Deleuze and Guatarri identify as desire.    The problem associated with a sign, such as Freud’s Oedipus and Oedipus Complex, is  this:  the referent (desire) is displaced onto an erroneous signified.  It’s as if the subject, once acquainted with the Oedipus Complex, says, “Oh, that’s [incest] what I want.”  The Oedipus Complex creates desire that might not otherwise exist.
We analyze the statement that “Lefty was representative of Las Vegas” (Roemer 1994: 111) in light of Knights’ comments.  In other words, we find in that statement a “dualism”: Lefty (an individual) and Las Vegas (a city).  But more importantly, we ask these questions:  Are other dualisms present in these stories? Do the stories of Lefty Rosenthal and Las Vegas commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness? We begin our analysis of Lefty Rosenthal’s activities in Las Vegas by reviewing the story.
The Story
 Pileggi’s book (1995) is a compilation of first-person interviews, including interviews with Lefty Rosenthal.  Roemer’s book (1994) reports mob activities from the point of view of a former FBI agent who worked in Las Vegas (Roemer himself).  In other words, both books are histories: i.e., objective reports about unequivocal, concrete events that occurred in the past.  What were these events?
 In 1974 Allen Glick purchased the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas.  Financed by the Teamster’s pension fund, the purchase was arranged through a mobster: i.e., a “made” member of La Cosa Nostra.  In time, Glick owned four casinos, and Lefty Rosenthal became Glick’s employee.  According to Roemer, Lefty was the “hidden boss” of the Stardust.  Although Lefty could not obtain a Nevada gaming license, Lefty was able to work inside the casinos.  Lefty is Jewish and, therefore, not a “made” member of the LCN.  The mob’s man in Las Vegas was Tony Spilotro, a boyhood friend of Lefty.  A known member of the LCN, Tony could not work inside the casinos. Under the guidance of the inside man, La Cosa Nostra in Chicago received the “skim”:  i.e., money skimmed from the gambling tables.
 Throughout the seventies, mob operations of the casinos boomed, and Lefty Rosenthal married a beautiful former showgirl named Geri.  According to Pileggi and Roemer, Geri was addicted to alcohol and drugs. Lefty and Geri lived in a $1 million home facing the fourteenth tee of the Las Vegas Country Club.  However, by 1980, LCN activities in Vegas stumbled. Despite LCN prohibitions against such affairs, Tony Spilotro violated protocol and “sponsored” Geri Rosenthal. The mob watched Tony, Lefty, and Geri. The FBI maintained constant surveillance over the mob’s activities.  The Nevada Gaming Commission watched Lefty.  In 1981, a car bomb that may have been planted by Tony severely injured Lefty.  In 1984 Tony was indicted for racketeering.  In 1986 Tony was beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield.  Also in 1986, Glick testified in court against the mob, and four high-ranking mob bosses—including Joey Aiuppa, the top boss of the Chicago mob—were in handcuffs on their way to Leavenworth.
 Never a “made” man, Lefty retired to Florida.  Geri Rosenthal, who died of a drug overdose, may have been murdered.  Glick retired to La Jolla, “with a full private security force including, at one time, former FBI agent Bill Fleming” (Roemer 1995: 256). According to Roemer, the work of the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago reduced the activities of the LCN (1995: 283), and the mob lost its hold on the Vegas casinos.  Today, legitimate corporations own the casinos.  In 1990, for example, there were 20 gambling stocks on Wall Street.
 From an historical point of view, these stories of Pileggi and Roemer are, in Knights’ words, “true representations of a reality”  (1997:3-4).  A former FBI agent, Roemer writes, “There are writers with much greater literary success than mine who are writing the story of Las Vegas, authors who I like and respect.  However, unlike many of them, I have ‘been there.’  I’m not writing about something I don’t know.  I knew Tony Spilotro, I know Chicago, and I know Las Vegas” (1994: xiii).  Pileggi and Roemer have “been there,” but we suggest that their [Pileggi’s and Roemer’s] realities are not independent of the observers.  Their realities reflect their points of view.  Roemer, for example, reflects the policeman’s point of view. Pileggi’s inside account does not include interviews with Geri Rosenthal or Tony Spilotro.  La Cosa Nostra has no voice in the story.  So, in other words, multiple realities are apparent: the reality of each participant and the reality of each observer, who is generally privileged in scientific research.  The statement “Lefty represents Las Vegas” is now unclear.  “True” representation implies one reality, but multiple participants and observers imply multiple realities.   To explore this notion of multiple realities and to explore another dualism, we look at archetypal psychology.
Archetypal Psychology
 For a time, Jung was a devoted follower and friend of Freud.  They parted company because Freud, an atheist, rejected Jung’s interpretation of myth.  According to Jung,
“A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. . . . But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn.  This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious.  I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal. . . . The contents of the collective unconscious . . . are known as archetypes”  (Jung 1936/ 1969:  3-4).
 
The collective unconscious, thus, is “hardwired to archetypes” (Lyons 1997) and can be contrasted to the Freudian personal unconscious. In general, the unconscious can be contrasted to “consciousness.”
The field of organizational psychology has examined the role of unconscious archetypes in the human psyche. Lyons (1997), for example, examines how the work of Eric Trist and William Whyte manifests the archetypal feminine.  Lyons identifies their work as a feminine backlash to the “masculine ethic” of rational management. Bowles (1997) employs an archetype—the hero—to explore the “myth of management.”  Like Lyons, Bowles suggests that technical rationality has influenced management and that such rationality is “antithetical to feeling, values, and emotions, which Jung regards as the core of who we are as human beings” (1997: 93). To some degree, we will extend—but revise—the work of Lyons and Bowles. Rather than the feminine archetype of Lyons or the hero archetype of Bowles, we see the trickster archetype operating in Las Vegas.
The trickster, together with such figures as the mother and child, is a Jungian archetype (1959/1969).  Archetypal material is known through dreams, fantasies, and myths. The stories told by Roemer and Pileggi may contain an unconscious, mythic level. We will suggest that Lefty Rosenthal, as described by Roemer and Pileggi, manifests the trickster archetype.
Jung described the trickster as a “psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (1959/ 1969: 260).  Jung continues, “[The trickster myth] holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday” (1959/ 1969: 267).  In other words, the Jungian archetypal trickster “represents [italics ours] a sort of primitive developmental level common to humanity” and “progresses developmentally within cultures as within an individual’s psychological growth, learning over time to deal with its bodily and sexual appetites” (Doty and Hynes 1993: 15). However, as explained by Doty and Hynes, “various voices . . . have been raised against seeing the trickster as inferior” (1993: 22).   To examine the various views of the archetype, we examine the traits of the trickster.
The Trickster in Las Vegas
.   According to Hynes  (1993) the following are traits of the tricksters:
1. The trickster is ambiguous, anomalous, and polyvalent:  i.e., the epitome of oppositions and extremes.
2. The trickster is a deceiver and trick-player.  He disrupts, lies, and cheats.  However, the trickster may be deceived in return.  In one North American Indian tale, the trickster entices some ducks to dance with their eyes closed; whereupon, the trickster wrings their necks, but while the trickster naps, others steal the ducks.
3. The trickster is a shape-shifter or master of disguise.
4. The trickster is a situation-invertor and can overturn any person, place, or belief.  He can turn a place of safety into one of danger and a bad situation into a good situation.
5. The trickster often has uncertain or impure birth, so he serves as a messenger of the gods. He can breach boundaries, cross lines, and mediate.
6. The trickster is a bricoleur:  a fixer or person able to transform anything and find creative solutions to problems.

Examples of tricksters are Ananse (African), Brer Rabbit (American Southern), Coyote (American Indian), Hermes (Greek), Herschel (Jewish), Horang-I (Korean), and Uncle Tompa (Tibetan). The following paragraphs link the trickster archetype with Lefty Rosenthal.
The trickster is ambiguous, anomalous, and polyvalent.  He has uncertain or impure birth.  Because he’s Jewish, Lefty is not a “made” guy or member of La Cosa Nostra; nevertheless, he worked inside the casinos.  Unlike his friend Tony Spilotro, a “made” guy from Chicago who was not allowed to enter casinos, Lefty could be the messenger of the gods.  According to Hynes (1993: 39), the trickster because of his “uncertain or impure” birth can “slip back and forth across the border.”   Lefty could slip in and out of the casino, even though Spilotro—the made guy—could not enter the casino.
During the 1970s, one of Lefty’s jobs in Las Vegas was the “skim.”  Skimming is the bricoleur’s task; skim is the money stolen from gaming tables and slot machines before it can be officially counted.  According to Roemer, under each gaming table is a “drop-box” (1994: 83), but any dealer can skim because he can “palm” any bill.  Collusion among dealers, shift managers, and casino managers permits heavy skimming.  During the 1960s, Bobby Kennedy estimated that $10 million a year was skimmed from Nevada casinos”;  according to Roemer (1994: 143), Tony (with Lefty’s assistance) sent millions of dollars a year in skim to Chicago.  Tony and Lefty worked together in Vegas “to produce the skim and make sure it was huge [and] . . . to get it back to Chicago” (Roemer 1994: 192).
  Although the trickster is a messenger, the trickster’s status among the gods is “unstable” (Hynes 1993: 41); sometimes, the trickster will imitate the power of the gods and find himself ostracized.   During his years in Las Vegas, Lefty was incredibly presumptuous.  He sought publicity and lived in a million dollar home.   Lefty wrote feature columns for the Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Valley Time newspapers.  He hosted a television variety show from the Stardust casino. For years Lefty attempted to secure a Nevada gaming license and challenged the hierarchy of the LCN, the Nevada gaming commission, the FBI, and the courts.
Like a trickster, Lefty cheated and deceived.  One of the interesting characteristics of tricksters is that, as deceivers, they are susceptible to being deceived. For example, in a North American Indian tale, the trickster “entices a group of ducks into dancing with their eyes closed, whereupon he wrings their necks, one by one, anticipating a nice meal” (Hynes 1993: 35).  But, while the trickster naps to rest from his activities, other animals eat the ducks.   Like the North American Indian trickster, Lefty as the deceiver was also deceived. According to Suzanne Kloud, who was a friend of Lefty’s wife Geri, Lefty cheated on Geri:  “He’d come home after his show at three or four in the morning, kick her out of bed, and talk to one of his girlfriends on the phone for two hours.  . . .  He was always screwing around”  (Pileggi 1995:  279).   Lefty was “screwing around” and then Tony began to “screw his pal”  (Roemer 1994: 194) by “sponsoring” Lefty’s wife, Geri.   The cheater was cheated.
Not too surprisingly, Lefty ran afoul of the mob. Even after the car bombing, Lefty challenged the gods of the LCN; he held a press conference (Pileggi 1995: 328) and inverted a bad situation into good press.  Currently, Lefty—an accomplished shape shifter—has a web page, frankleftyrosenthal.com, where he is described as the “country’s top handicapper” and where visitors see a photograph of Robert DeNiro as “Ace”: i.e., Lefty Rosenthal.  Unlike Glick, Lefty did not testify against the mob. Lefty the trickster fared better than Tony, who was found beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield.
Lefty Rosenthal exhibits trickster traits, and the stories told by Pileggi and Roemer appear to be trickster narratives.  Although Roemer and Pileggi were essentially privileged observers, Lefty as trickster is both a character in the stories and, because his “inside account” is found in Pileggi’s text, a narrator.  According to Doueihi, trickster stories juxtapose the “discursive, signifying aspect of the narrative and the referential, signified aspect of the text as story” (1993: 193). The latter “text as story” focuses on the trickster as a character “in” stories.  Lefty is a character in the story of Las Vegas, but he is more.  We would like to explore the “more,” but first we would like to look at the trickster character “in” the stories.
Doueihi argues that most analyses focus on the trickster as a character in stories, thus treating “language conventionally, as a transparent medium for the communication of some meaning or another” (1993: 194).  In other words, the stories of Roemer and Pileggi report unequivocal events in which Lefty Rosenthal played a part.  When the trickster is a character in the story, the meaning communicated is in terms of a story of human religious and cultural history, “and particularly in relation to the origin” (1993: 194).  In relation to an “origin,” history is frequently seen as “progress from primitive darkness and ignorance toward clarity and meaning” (1993: 194).  The trickster, then, represents the primitive darkness as seen from the point of view of modern Western scholars or writers, and the trickster becomes a part of the Western distortion and suppression of the Other (1993: 196).  Trickster stories point to a “conventional reality . . . produced out of a particular univocal interpretation of phenomena appearing as signs” (1993: 198).
A conventional interpretation of the Vegas trickster narrative with Lefty as a character in the story is this:  Lefty as representative of mob operations in Las Vegas represents “the origin” of Vegas. So, viewed conventionally, the Vegas story seems to be one of progress, progress from the primitive mobster days to the days of legitimate corporations.
However, Doueihi suggests that trickster narratives can break down  “into an open-ended play of signifiers” (1993: 199). Lefty is character and narrator. Although Lefty as character is “fixed” by the story because he can’t change the story, Lefty as narrator creates the story.  As Doty and Hynes suggest, the trickster “often . . . represents this or that, or perhaps this and that”   (1993: 24).  The point is that Lefty as narrator grapples with border-crossing, ambiguity, and marginality.  Lefty describes a meeting with Gil Beckley, “the most prominent bookmaker and layoff man in the United States,” as follows:
“He [Beckley] says to me, . . . ‘Lefty, I want to tell you something. . . . I’m going to tell you something that you need to keep precious to you for the rest of your life. . . . I’d give half of what I own’—and this is a wealthy man at the time—‘if I was as clean as you.  Stay that way.’ I’ll never forget that, but at the time I didn’t really know what he meant.  I didn’t respond.  But he was telling me to play it smooth.  Don’t get pinched.   Watch your reputation.  Don’t get labeled [italics ours]” (Pileggi 1995:48).

Although Lefty didn’t always play it smooth, he’s alive and working in Florida.  Geri and Tony are dead.
 Myths in which the trickster is narrator are “open-ended.”  The trickster can be this or that, this and that.  R. D. Laing said that his understanding of schizophrenia was enhanced by studies of West African trickster myths (Doty and Hynes 1993: 25).   Trickster myths in which the trickster is a character are representations; they are dualistic, usually differentiating the “origin” from the present, and they reify both the origin and modernity. The point is that trickster myths as signified stories are representational, but trickster narratives can signify this or that, this and that.  The signifying aspect of the narrative is discussed in the following paragraphs.
Anti-Oedipus
 Holland, in his book about the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari, argues that Deleuze and Guattari “reject representation itself . . . as a distortion of the real mode of operation of the unconscious” (1999: 22).    Specifically, as mentioned above, Deleuze and Guattari critique Freud’s reification of Oedipus, arguing that the signifier, Oedipus, and the signified, Oedipus Complex, say nothing about the referent, desire.    In general, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that any fixed representation distorts the referent and that representations have historical specificity, not universal truth.  Furthermore by rejecting the notion of stable identities, they [Deleuze and Guattari] celebrate personal change and multiple desires:  i.e., they promote “schizophrenia” as unlimited semiosis  or a “process of deterritorialization” (1972/ 1977: 282).  Their celebration of change  as “absolute decoding” (1972/ 1977: 250) has been criticized.  Glass (1993), among others, says that Deleuze and Guattari romanticize schizophrenia, which conventional clinicians identify as a serious disease.   We would like to examine Lefty’s story as a “process of deterritorialization.”
 First, we suggest the following:  To the extent that Lefty represents Las Vegas, the “missing” referent is, as with Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex, desire itself, an ever-changing energy which resists labeling, just as the trickster resists labeling. To the extent that Lefty represents Las Vegas, desire is displaced to the casinos of 20th century Las Vegas.  It’s as if the gamblers in Las Vegas say, “Oh, that’s [the slot machines and neon lights of Las Vegas] what I want.”  The referent (desire) is displaced onto an erroneous signified (Vegas). Our suggestion historicizes the referent.  Instead of suffering from a fixed Oedipal Complex, subjects in Las Vegas at the end of the twentieth century gamble.
 Second, we suggest the following: When Roemer, in his book about Vegas, says, “Lefty had traveled a road paved with controversy and dispute,” Roemer is identifying a schizophrenic process.  Acording to Deleuze and Guattari, “schizo-flows . . . animate ‘our’ arts and ‘our’ sciences” (1972/ 1977:245).  The schizophrenic self possesses multiple desires.  Whereas the modernist perceives stability—of the essential self and essential things—the postmodern schizophrenic of Anti-Oedipus perceives differences. The schizophrenic of Deleuze and Guattari views a landscape of multiple images because “things” lack fixed substance. As Doueihi says, trickster narratives can be open-ended signifiers, signifying this and that, this or that (1993).
For example, Pileggi introduces Frank in this way:
“Frank Rosenthal came to Las Vegas in 1968 for the same reason so many other
Americans have—to get away from his past.  Las Vegas was a city with no memory.   It was the place you went for a second chance.  It was the American
city where people went after the divorce, after the bankruptcy, even after a
short stint in the county jail. . . . It was also a city where you could strike it
rich—a kind of money-happy Lourdes” (1995:13).

Frank and other Americans are not “stuck” with any identity.  Changes in the self are possible, according to Deleuze and Guattari.  In “money-happy Lourdes,” the arbiter of success is money, an abstract and empty image of value. Lefty came to Las Vegas seeking a second chance, and after his car is bombed, he is given yet another chance in Florida. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the positive aspect of a place like Las Vegas would be its meaninglesssness:  i.e., its rapid deterritorialization and decoding of meaning, such that the Frank Rosenthals of the world can get away from the past.
One way to understand this schizophrenic process of deterritorialization and decoding is to look at Lefty’s battle with the Nevada Gaming Commission.  According to Pileggi,
“The commission’s refusal to license him [Lefty] was supposed to be the
end of Lefty Rosenthal at the Stardust.  Lefty was to be out of gaming. . . . On
January 29, 1976, Lefty moved out of his newly refurbished office at the
Stardust and went home.  The next day control board investigators learned
that his $2.5 million ten-year contract was still in effect.  Lefty Rosenthal had
no intention of  either quitting or giving up.  .  . . From local courts to state
courts to state appeals courts to U. S. district courts to U.S. appeals courts
and all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Lefty led a parade of legal
maneuverings.  He won some.  He lost some.  When he won, he moved back
into his offices at the Stardust.  When he lost, he moved out.”  (1995: 198-203).

The schizophrenic, say Deleuze and Guattari, “does not confine himself inside contradictions; on the contrary, he opens out and, like a spore case inflated with spores, releases them as so many singularities” (1972/ 1977: 77).  Lefty did not confine himself.
His efforts at promoting his cause continued despite constant “reterritorialization”  and “recoding” of his efforts by governing bodies.
In a place like Las Vegas, “schizo-flows” are permitted to “travel in a free state”—deterritorialization and decoding—but a counter tendency—reterritorialization and recoding—develops (1972/ 1977: 246).   For Deleuze and Guattari, the schizo-flows are related to capitalism in general; we focus our discussion on Las Vegas and suggest that Vegas functions by “pushing back” against the very “schizo-flows” it initially permitted (1972/ 1977: 250).  Las Vegas, or a social setting like Vegas, functions only by inhibiting “with one hand what it decodes with the other” (1972/ 1977: 246). Frank could move to Florida and begin again.  Of course, in Florida, he found himself again in the gaming industry.  Frank  is, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari,  “recaptured.” The positive side of Las Vegas is its meaninginglessness;  the negative aspect is its tendency to “reterritorialize” subjects.    As Frank Rosenthal said in a 1997 interview,
‘Winning is virtually impossible. . . . and you have to admire the Wall Street and major corporations recognizing the potential. [of gambling] . . . Today it’s [gambling] legal.  You have the power and influence of respectable major conglomerates, and that’s the big difference today versus 20 or 30 years ago.”

Although the mob is not getting the skim, Wall Street recognizes the potential of legalized gambling. Alliances “no longer pass through people but through money” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/ 1977:  264).
To summarize our interpretation of Lefty’s story from an Anti-Oedipal, anti-representational viewpoint, we argue that desire is displaced in Vegas and that Lefty is a kind of postmodern schizophrenic who escapes Vegas only to be reterritorialized in Florida.  The beauty of the capitalistic system as exemplified by Wall Street is that individuals are socially formed and, though subject to “recapture” and “reterritorialization,” they are still relatively free.
In our discussion of the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, we have examined Lefty’s story, but ignored the made guy, Tony Spilotro.   Tony is not free.  Tony and La Cosa Nostra are pre-capitalistic; their activities impose extraeconomic factors (1972/1977: 249).  These extraeconomic forces are Mob protocol and codes, which have the kind of meaning absent in money.  Capitalistic subjects are not confined by codes such as confine made members of La Cosa Nostra.  Capitalistic alliances “no longer pass through people but through money” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/ 1977:  264).

Summary
 We began by addressing the issue of representation in this statement:  “Lefty represents Las Vegas.”  We examined the statement in three ways.  First, the statement can be interpreted as simply an historical observation. Second, the statement can be interpreted in Jungian archetypal fashion by identifying Lefty Rosenthal as a trickster. A conventional interpretation of the Vegas trickster narrative with Lefty as a character in the story is this:  Lefty as representative of mob operations in Las Vegas represents “the origin” of Vegas. So, viewed conventionally, the Vegas story seems to be one of progress, progress from the primitive mobster days to the days of legitimate corporations. Third, the statement can be interpreted in light of a Jungian revision.  That is, the trickster can signify this and that, this or that, in an open-ended fashion suggestive of Anti-Oedipal  schizophrenia.  This third interpretation specifically follows Deleuze and Guattari in avoiding a fixed representation of unconscious desire.  Whereas Jung understood a collective unconscious  "hardwired to archetypes,” such as the trickster, Deleuze and Guattari describe a “productive” unconscious, a “desiring machine that does not represent anything” (1972/ 1977: 47).
 Jung’s collective unconscious is unlike the desiring machine of Deleuze and Guattari.  An important difference is the materialistic and social component of a “desiring machine.”  Deleuze and Guattari connect the social and personal.  That is, they historicize desire and the unconscious in ways that are not found in the works of Jung and Freud.  By connecting social and personal production (machines), they avoid the fixed representations of archetypes and Oedipus.    However, the work of Deleuze and Guattari seems dualistic. As Knights says,“What has come to be defined as the problem of dualism occurs when . . . ‘this’ or ‘that’ is reified as an ontological reality rather than merely a provisional, subjectively significant, and hence contestable, ordering of ‘thing’.”  Deleuze and Guattari speak of decoding and recoding, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, capitalism and pre-capitalism.  We would like to suggest that the dualisms of Deleuze and Guattari appear to be “contestable, ordering of ‘thing’” rather than reifications of an ontological reality.  Whereas the modernist perceives stability—of the essential self and essential things—the postmodern schizophrenic of Anti-Oedipus perceives differences.  The differences are dualistic, but appear to avoid the reification and essentialism found in Jung and Freud.  Of course, readers may disagree with our assessment.
 We hope that organization studies can benefit from our examination of representation.  We have attempted to identify issues and further critique of all representations, including those found in the organizational literature.

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References
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