Winnicott and the Politics of Subjectivity at Work

This paper is an exercise in theorizing political subjectivity through the lens of Winnicott and in the context of contemporary workplace politics. While scholars have made considerable traction applying Winnicott’s thinking to work and organizational settings, rarely is political agency and its connection to worker resistance and emancipation explored. This paper argues that Winnicott offers a novel and underappreciated theory of political subjectivity that is both at odds with relational thinking by advocating for a fundamental “incommunicado” element of separateness, and distinct from an inherently mediated (or inscribed) view of subjectivity by allowing for spontaneity and surprise. Specifically, what Winnicott’s theory of political subjectivity offers is a sense of being at ease, or “going-on-being,” that in its most basic sense is a feeling of aliveness that comes in and through the spontaneous gesture. If this view of subjectivity, grounded in Winnicott’s signature concept of the true self, is at once suspect of essentialism and liberal bourgeois individualism, it is also precisely where we must start from in reclaiming a place to truly live. This paper explores how the true self’s unknown, unfound, and forever non-communicating qualities possess a “queer kind of truth” in the face of an impinging neoliberal order, and particularly in a world of work where a fetishized subjectivity, premised on the self’s exploitative use, is at play. Moreover, it is from this vantage that the call for recognition—the goal of much progressive workplace politics—becomes a trap; a way to expose the self to further forms of compliance-ridden exploitation.