Framing essay : subjectivity in a diverse economy

In its nearly 30-year history, diverse economies scholarship has used a wide variety of thinking traditions to understand economic subjectivity and theorize subjects who might desire and enact postcapitalist community economies. In this chapter we aim to clarify what the term ‘subject’ has come to mean in the context of a diverse, more-than-capitalist, economy. We introduce an open-ended and anti-essentialist approach to the ‘decentred subject’ that has been core to diverse economies thinking (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2008). First, we contrast this approach to two competing theories of economic subjectivity that are informed by theoretical humanism and structuralism respectively. We then chart how thinking about the decentred subject of a diverse economy has developed, concluding with recent thinking that demotes the primacy of the ‘human’ subject. We argue that holding on to the open, experimental disposition of the decentred subject is crucial at a time when much of what has appeared solid – democracy, so-called global capitalism, and the stability of the earth’s life giving ecologies – appears to be faltering.