At the Limits of Symbolic Need Production: Generativity Beyond Scarcity

In economic theory value is ordinarily the prior term, and yet in practice the market inclines toward need, which is more readily operable than value. The formation of need itself remains comparatively little examined, left to marketing and to the study of consumption rather than to the theory of value. This paper takes the symbolic constitution of need as its object. It argues that the contemporary economic order depends, to a considerable degree, less on the satisfaction of need than on the production of it, and that this production is symbolic, working upon the residue of desire that no object completes. The account is built in two movements. The first is diagnostic. It reconstructs the mechanism through which symbols constitute need, draws on the Lacanian distinction of need, demand, and desire to show why symbolic need production is structurally sustained rather than incidental, and situates the argument within the line of psychoanalytic critique that runs from Marcuse through Baudrillard to the theorists of surplus enjoyment, marking at each station the point at which the present account departs. It then names the present difficulty. The symbolic order that produces need is losing its capacity to do so reliably, a condition here called symbolic inflation, in which the supply of signs runs ahead of the relational value they can redeem. The second movement is constructive. It advances one way of approaching and developing economic thought that begins from generativity, a way that stands beside the approaches which begin from scarcity and leaves them in place. On this approach a range of familiar relational forms may be reread as positive-holonomy cycles that generate surplus without possessing it, and need is relocated as one state within a relational system rather than the sole and primordial origin of the value cycle. The argument continues a programme that has replaced the individual with generative relational being and the sign with a generative relational epistemology, and carries that programme onto the terrain of political economy. It closes, in the manner it requires of itself, on the questions that any generative economics would have to confront.