Subjectivity

“What is it to be a subject? What is it to be subject to the economy? What is it to be an economic subject? A spontaneous answer to these questions treats the subject as synonymous with the `individual'. We easily recognize this figure in our daily encounters as someone we know by name and through their character and identity (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nation-ality, etc.). In mainstream economic theory this human individual is an economic subject insofar as they are able to 'calculate the ability of external objects to satisfy their needs and desires' and express and act upon preferences based on beliefs regarding the possible states of the economy (Ruccio 2007, p. 34). They may prefer, for example, work or idleness, caring at home or taking a job in the market, investing in human capital or rent-seeking. While such a subject might appear common sense to those of us living in the minority world, influenced by centuries of 'Western liberal' thought, it is a particular, historical and essentialist concep-tion, one that stems from what we will name, along with other scholars, theoretical humanism (Althusser et al. 2015; Madra 2017).
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These contending theories seal us into stable and hierarchical relations, distributing roles between subjectivity and economy, fixing us in space — the subject as individual is either detached from and operative above the economic structure, or the structure is above, determining the individual subject. While the humanist scenario conjures up an image of the economy as the playground of subjects who move about as immutably sovereign individuals, the structuralist scenario draws a picture of the economy as that which subjugates us, its subjects, to its inexorably capricious dictates. The megalomania underlying the first image is matched only by the paranoia lurking behind the second. From a diverse economies perspective, the very framing of this debate between the sovereign subject and the subjugated subject is problematic and deeply unsatisfying. A shared premise confines the subject (and the economy) to one or other side of a series of binary oppositions — constitutive/constituted, powerful/powerless, active/passive, determining/determined, subject/predicate, possessing/belonging, animal/ machine and agency/servitude. These opposed locations preemptively rule out a conception of economy and an economic subject as mutually constitutive and diverse, as an open-ended field of affects, as dispositifs of valuations, of a human/non-human assemblage distributed across various scales.” *