Archetypal Images at the Stardust Casino: Understanding Human Experience

Special Issue

Abstract

In 1978, Lefty Rosenthal—a former Chicago bookmaker—became Director of Entertainment at the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Roemer (1994: 111), 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». 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 be somewhat post-Jungian, and following the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari (1977), we will put forward a revised Jungian account for the material genealogy of Las Vegas. We conclude the paper by commenting upon the “demise of representation” (Knights, 1997) and its implications for organizational theory.