Scarcity

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Apr 10 21:03:10 PDT 2001



>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>>>In message <p0500191bb6f4544fa9e5@[140.254.114.190]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
>>><furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>>>>>>Could you tell us why you think scarcity is inescapable?
>>>
>>>Justin, wisely:
>>>
>>>>>We will never live on the Great Rock Candy Mountain, where roast
>>> >>chickens grow on trees and fish jump into our frying pans.
>>
>>But--from the perspective of any previous millennium--we do live on
>>Big Rock Candy Mountain...
>
>But does it feel that way? There's no evidence that increases in
>wealth, beyond a certain minimum, make people happier (or lead them
>to report themselves as being happier). There's no satisfaction in
>satisfaction, as Freud put it.
>
>Doug

An excerpt from "A Hunger Artist" by Kafka:

***** ... Why stop fasting at this particular moment, after forty days of it? He had held out for a long time, an illimitably long time; why stop now, when he was in his best fasting form, or rather, not yet quite in his best fasting form? Why should he be cheated of the fame he would get for fasting longer, for being not only the record hunger artist of all time, which presumably he was already, but for beating his own record by a performance beyond human imagination, since he felt that there were no limits to his capacity for fasting?...

Many more days went by, however, and that too came to an end. An overseer's eye fell on the cage one day and he asked the attendants why this perfectly good cage should be left standing there unused with dirty straw inside it; nobody knew, until one man, helped out by the notice board, remembered about the hunger artist. They poked into the straw with sticks and found him in it. ``Are you still fasting?'' asked the overseer, ``when on earth do you mean to stop?'' ``Forgive me, everybody,'' whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who had his ear to the bars, understood him. ``Of course,'' said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, ``we forgive you.'' ``I always wanted you to admire my fasting,'' said the hunger artist. ``We do admire it,'' said the overseer, affably. ``But you shouldn't admire it,'' said the hunger artist. ``Well then we don't admire it,'' said the overseer, ``but why shouldn't we admire it?'' ``Because I have to fast, I can't help it,'' said the hunger artist. ``What a fellow you are,'' said the overseer, ``and why can't you help it?'' ``Because,'' said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, ``because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.'' These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.

``Well, clear this out now!'' said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all....

<http://www.rockswithfeet.com/kafka/aHungerArtist.html> *****

"Unlimited wants" (which are the cause of scarcity) of economics is a real abstraction created by capitalism with its drive of M-C-M', figuratively presented by Kafka as the compulsion to fast that consumes the hunger artist. No concrete pleasure, no particular food, however exquisite, can satisfy the demand of "unlimited wants" born of M-C-M' (= Lacan's "desire" = Freud's "death drive").

Yoshie



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