Reframing freelancing for difference :|towards a post-fantasmatic politics of work and class

Abstract

This thesis studies freelancing as a distinct form of employment and provides a critical account of the reigning neoliberal discourses on freelancing, as well as of the working and living experiences of freelancers in order to rethink class politics under conditions of precarity. Freelancing condition is argued to be an overdetermined result of various processes, including neoliberal restructuring of the labor markets, neoliberal discourses on economic subjectivity, and the desires of freelancers to articulate and negotiate the variety of problems that they encounter in their workplaces and establish alternative ways of working and living. In the entrepreneurial neoliberal discourse, freelancing is imagined to involve having a sovereign existence in having control over one's working conditions, not bound by the constrains of time and place. The thesis also analyses the psychic impact of this discourse of sovereignty on freelancers, pointing to its political implications. Then, an analysis of freelancing experience is provided in relation to the debates on class and work. The study aims at not only contributing to a critical discussion of the neoliberal discourses on freelancing, but also opening up space for rethinking class politics under conditions of insecurity and flexibility. The final chapter gives an account of such an attempt by looking at the experiences of self-organizing freelancers in a common space called Dünyada Mekân (A Place in the World) and a network of solidarity called Ofissizler (The Officeless) in Istanbul.