Politics of (in)Visibility and Enterprising Self-Constitution Among Indian Information Technology Employees

How do neoliberal subjects experience (in)visibility in their projects of the self, at what costs and with what effects? Theorising the spectre of invisibility/imperceptibility as a constant threat to one’s sense of self, existence and survival within neoliberal governmentality, we studied experiences of self-(in)visibilization among Indian Information Technology employees. Our analysis shows that enterprising subjects experienced fourfold threats of invisibility/imperceptibility—exclusion, obsolescence, managerial disfavours and psychic incoherence—which led them to visibilize themselves as indispensable, continuously upgraded, sycophantic and coherent subjects. However, such self-visibilization also produced its traps and dangers, which included living with existential insecurity and being caught in the impermanence and oppressive double bind of visibility. Employees sought to address these challenges by reposing their belief in continuous revisibilization, manipulating one’s (in)visibility, or enacting multiple visibilities. This paper contributes to the extant critical neoliberal organizational scholarship by theorizing and illustrating non-disciplinary politics of (in)visibility at work within a milieu of precarity as well as demonstrating its consequences on enterprising self-constitution and acts of resistance.