Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy

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 the authors clarify what the term ‘subject’ has come to mean in the context of a diverse, more than capitalist, economy. They introduce their concept of the ‘decentred subject’ and contrast their open-ended and anti-essentialist approach to two competing theories of economic subjectivity that are informed by theoretical humanism and structuralism respectively. They then chart the development of the decentred subject across three cumulative iterations of diverse economies scholarship. They argue that the decentred subject is critical for any efforts at shifting attachments, forming more sustainable relations and new forms of living together, and recognizing and negotiating the conditions and antagonisms of our shared interdependence – this process of negotiation is what J.K. Gibson-Graham name community economy.