At the Limits of Symbolic Need Production - Generativity Beyond Scarcity
ENGLISH
At the Limits of Symbolic Need Production
Generativity Beyond Scarcity
Wanhong Huang (huangwanhong.g.official@gmail.com)
Abstract
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.
Keywords: need production; symbolic crisis; symbolic inflation; generative relational being; scarcity; value theory; political economy; Lacan; generativity; holonomy.
AI usage statement: The ideas, claims, and theoretical framework of this paper originate with the author. AI tools were used as an aid in drafting, in the location and verification of empirical and bibliographic sources, and in revision. The origin of each idea has been verified by the author, who takes full responsibility for the content.
§1 Introduction: The Practical Priority of Need
The argument of this paper begins in a gap between what economic theory works out and what economic practice does. In theory, value is ordinarily the prior term. The theory of utility and of preference is developed first, and demand is derived from it, so that value in the theoretical sense comes before need. In practice, the market and the capital that moves through it incline toward need, and they do so for a reason that this paper takes as its point of departure. Need is more operationalizable than value. It can be acted upon by an instrument that lies ready to hand, worked, moved, and turned to account with an immediacy that value does not permit, and the instrument by which it is so worked is the symbolic system, the order that a certain tradition of thought has named the big Other. Value, by contrast, is the more complex thing. It reaches into the generative dimension of the subject, into the slow formation of a being that can value at all, and it cannot be coded and discharged in a single symbolic stroke. Need lends itself to symbolic codification because it can be represented through identifiable objects, whereas value concerns the longer and more contingent formation of capacities, relations, and forms of life. An advertisement can produce, today, the want of a particular good. It cannot produce, today, a person whose relations are generative, for that is the work of a formation for which no single sign can stand in. The formal ground of this difference is given later in the paper. Here it is enough to see that need can be bound to an object and value cannot. Capital is not absent from the domain of value. It reaches value too. But it reaches value by longer and more indirect means, through the shaping of culture in its several forms, corporate, commercial, social, and national, through education, through the media, and through an entry into the early formation of the subject itself. The directness with which need can be worked, and the indirectness with which value must be approached, is the difference from which this paper sets out.
This difference has a consequence that organizes the whole of what follows. Because need is the layer that the symbolic instrument can work directly, it is upon need that the labour of the market concentrates, and the contemporary economic order comes to depend less on the satisfaction of need than on its production. This is the paper’s central claim, and it is the author’s own. The theories it draws upon in the course of establishing it, from political economy and from psychoanalysis alike, are summoned as means of argument and not as authorities from which the claim is derived. The claim is that the greater part of what a consumption economy treats as need is constituted symbolically, brought into being as a desirable form within an order of meaning, and that this constitution has become the economy’s true engine. What is purchased in the ordinary transaction is a sign that promises to close a lack, and the lack it promises to close is one that no purchase can close, so that the promise renews itself with each transaction and the engine turns again. This paper accordingly concerns itself with need in a particular register. Bodily need, in hunger and thirst and cold and the want of shelter, provides the indispensable conditions of life and is not in question, and no theory earns anything by denying it. The need this argument follows is the need that enters economic circulation, becomes an object of exchange, and is continually reshaped through symbolic mediation. Its inner structure, and the sense in which it stands closer to desire than to bodily need, is taken up when the mechanism of its production is examined below.
Why the market should concentrate upon need in this way admits of an answer in political economy. Capital lives by the realization of value, by the completion of the circuit in which what is produced is sold and the value it carries is turned back into money and advanced again. The pressure of realization is immediate and recurrent, set by the time of turnover, and it presses the market toward whatever layer can be worked at the speed that realization demands. Need, operable directly through the sign, is that layer. Value, in its generative depth, moves too slowly to answer the pressure of the circuit, and this is why the direct labour of the market falls upon need and the reach into value remains indirect.
Why the sign can work need directly admits of an answer in the theory of the subject. Need, once it is addressed to another in language, becomes demand, and demand is constituted and answered in the field of the big Other, the symbolic order in which the subject speaks and is spoken to. Capital installs itself in that field, or lives upon it, and from within it can bind the object-cause of desire to a good and offer the good as the answer to a demand that no good completes. The sign works need because need, as demand, is already a creature of the symbolic order that the sign commands. The full development of this mechanism is given in a later section. It is enough at the outset to see that the operability of need is grounded in the symbolic constitution of demand, and that this is what places the instrument of need production in the market’s hand.
A difficulty follows that the discipline is not equipped to see, because it lies below the level at which the discipline begins. The symbolic order that produces need can produce it well or badly, reliably or unreliably, and there is reason to think that it now produces it less and less reliably. The signs that once organized need with a certain steadiness, the credential, the brand, the mark of taste and of belonging, have begun to lose their hold. When symbols can no longer reliably produce need, the value cycle that begins from need begins to lose its foundation. This is the condition the paper addresses, and it is a structural condition rather than a passing event, a limit approached rather than a threshold crossed. The title names it as a limit for this reason. The order of symbolic need production is reaching the edge of what it can do.
The argument continues a line of work with a recognizable signature. That work replaced the individual with generative relational being, and treated value as arising within relation rather than residing in a thing or issuing from a lack. It then replaced the sign with a generative relational epistemology, and treated the symbol as an expression of relational value rather than its source. The present paper carries that programme onto the terrain of political economy. It offers generativity as a starting point from which value may be understood, a starting point that lets the received accounts stand and sets a second reading beside them, and on that reading need is placed as one state within a relational system rather than as the origin from which value must be derived. The progression is deliberate. The programme has moved from ontology, through epistemology, to political economy, and the question of need is where that movement arrives.
The argument joins a tradition and departs from it. The claim that the economy produces need rather than merely meeting it is not new, and has a long history in critical thought, from the diagnosis of false needs in the mid-century critique of industrial society, through the analysis of sign value in the theory of consumer society, to the account of surplus enjoyment in the psychoanalytic critique of ideology. This paper stands on that history and departs from it on one point. The tradition has been strong in diagnosis and weak in construction. It has shown, with great force, how need is manufactured and how the sign holds the subject in place, and it has tended to leave the subject there, with no account of a value that would not be a manufactured one. The purpose of the present paper is to supply what the diagnosis lacks, a positive foundation of value that does not begin from lack, and to show that the symbolic crisis, read from that foundation, is the exhaustion of one historically particular way of organizing value rather than the exhaustion of value itself. The distinction that makes this possible rests on a formal criterion, drawn from earlier work in the programme, that separates a cycle which generates value without possessing it from a cycle that extracts value by keeping a lack open.
The paper proceeds as follows. It first brings to the surface the practical priority of need over value in the market and gives it its ground in the operability of need through the sign. It then sets out the machinery of symbolic need production and its ground in the structure of desire, and situates the argument within the line of psychoanalytic critique of the economy. It names and measures the present difficulty, the condition here called symbolic inflation, in which the supply of signs outruns the relational value they can redeem. It turns to the domain of value, and shows why value, in its generative depth, resists the direct symbolic operation to which need submits, so that capital reaches value only by the indirect means of culture, education, media, and the formation of the subject. On this basis it offers a reading of value that begins from generativity, supplies the formal criterion that distinguishes a generative cycle from an extractive one, and relocates need as one state within a relational system. It closes, in the manner it requires of itself, on the questions a generative economics would have to take up.
§2 Scarcity and the Constitution of Need
The purpose of this section is to read modern economics rather than to indict it, and to bring to the surface a feature its own procedures keep out of view. However the discipline arranges the priority of value and need between them, it takes the formation of need as given. The want arrives at the analysis already formed, as the demand curve arrives already drawn, and the work of the analysis begins on the far side of its formation. Whether demand is derived from a prior theory of value or read directly from choice, the origin of the want, its variation, and its susceptibility to being made are left outside the model. It is this exogeneity of need’s formation that the section brings out, for it is the opening through which the market’s labour upon need passes.
The lineage is worth stating plainly, because it shows how firmly the premise is held. In the definition that has organized the discipline for the better part of a century, economics is the study of human conduct as a relation between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses. The definition is precise and, on its own terms, powerful. It fixes the object of the discipline as the allocation of the scarce, and it fixes the ends, the needs and wants that allocation serves, as prior to the allocating. The ends are what one reasons from, not what one reasons about. A later and more austere development sealed the premise more tightly still. In the theory of revealed preference, the chooser’s wants are read off from the choices made, and the question of where those wants come from is ruled out of court rather than merely left unanswered, since nothing lies behind the choice that the theory is permitted to see. Need, in this lineage, is not explained and is not to be explained. It is the black box from which the whole apparatus draws its motive force.
Scarcity does not by itself supply the contents of that box. It explains the competition over limited means, and it cannot explain why one object rather than another comes to be wanted. Scarcity accounts for allocation. It does not account for constitution, and the constitution of the want is the question here. This is the point at which the received picture must be corrected, and corrected carefully, because the correction is easily mistaken for a familiar and weaker claim. The weaker claim divides needs into the true and the false, the natural and the artificial, and holds that a consumption economy inflames the false at the expense of the true. That division is not the one drawn here, and the account is built to avoid it. To sort needs into true and false is to occupy a position from which the genuine article can be told from the counterfeit, a position of survey above the relations in which need is actually formed, and no such position is available. The need for water and the need for a particular brand of water are not related as the real to the illusory. Both are needs, and both are constituted, organized into a wanted and pursued form within a relational and symbolic order. What distinguishes them is not that one is authentic and the other is not. It is the density of symbolic mediation each carries, the extent to which the form of the want is worked up out of signs. Thirst is lightly mediated and the need it grounds is close to its bodily occasion. The need for the mark of a life well lived is heavily mediated and stands at a distance from any occasion the body could name. Between these lies a continuous gradient, and the economy of a consumption society operates by moving need along it, toward the pole of dense mediation where the sign does the greater part of the constituting.
Every need is constituted within a relational and symbolic order. Needs are arranged along a gradient of symbolic mediation rather than sorted into the authentic and the manufactured, from the lightly mediated need close to its bodily occasion to the densely mediated need worked up almost entirely out of signs. A consumption economy operates by displacing need toward the densely mediated pole.
Read in this way, the received picture of the economy is seen to rest on a layer it does not theorize. The familiar cycle runs from scarcity to need, from need to the commodity that answers it, from the commodity to consumption, and from consumption to the accumulation that funds the next turn.
Scarcity → Need → Commodity → Consumption → Accumulation
The cycle presents need as its second term, following directly upon scarcity, as though the fact of limited means were enough to fix what is wanted. It is not. Before need, and constituting it, stands the sign. The cycle as actually operated has a term the diagram omits, and the omission is not innocent, since it is precisely the omitted term that the economy has learned to work.
Scarcity →Symbol→ Need → Commodity → Consumption → Accumulation
Modern economics, then, does not merely presuppose need. It presupposes the symbolic labour by which need is constituted, and treats the product of that labour as a natural fact. The consequence is that the discipline is well equipped to describe the allocation of means to ends and poorly equipped to describe the making of the ends themselves, which is the process that a consumption economy has raised to the centre of its operation. This omission acquires its full significance from the fact that the omitted layer is precisely the one upon which the labour of the market has come to concentrate, for reasons the next sections make plain. The section that follows takes that process as its subject.
The result may be put in the discipline’s own terms. Where economic models must treat the formation of need as exogenous, taking the want as given and beginning the analysis on the far side of its making, the account offered here finds that formation to be endogenous to the symbolic relations in which need is constituted. What the model must hold fixed, the symbolic order continually produces. The remainder of the paper follows that production.
§3 The Symbolic Production of Need
If need is constituted symbolically, the question is how the constituting is done, and by what mechanism a sign can bring a need into being rather than merely answer one already there. This section develops the answer in three movements. It sets out the machinery of symbolic need production as it operates in the ordinary institutions of a consumption economy. It then gives the mechanism its ground, drawing on the psychoanalytic account of desire to show why the production is structurally perpetual and not a contingent excess to be reformed away. It closes by placing the argument within the tradition of psychoanalytic critique of the economy, and marking at each station the point at which the present account moves beyond it.
The Machinery
The institutions that produce need are familiar and need only be named to be recognized. Advertising is the oldest and most direct of them. The brand carries the work forward, attaching to a good a settled identity that the good itself does not possess. The influencer lends a face and a life to the identity, so that it may be desired as something lived rather than merely claimed. The credential organizes need in the domain of work and standing, promising that the mark of an institution will secure the recognition it names. Social media distributes the whole apparatus into the texture of ordinary attention, and algorithmic recommendation learns each person’s susceptibilities and returns to them the signs most likely to move them. These are not separate mechanisms. They are stages of a single operation, the operation by which a want is worked up out of a sign.
What the operation trades in is never the good as such. The lipstick is not sold as a pigment. It is sold as the entitlement to be found beautiful and, through beauty, to be loved. The automobile is not sold as conveyance. It is sold as the standing of one who has arrived. The cup of coffee is not sold as a stimulant. It is sold as membership in a certain form of urban life. In each case the good is a vehicle, and what rides upon it is a promise of recognition, of belonging, of worth in the eyes of others. Need issues from meaning, and meaning issues from the sign. The consumer does not lack the object and then desire it. The sign constitutes the consumer as lacking, and offers the object as the route by which the lack may be closed. These institutions succeed only because they operate upon a prior structure of subjectivity, one in which a lack is already open and a recognition is already sought. The structure of the offer is what the next movement must explain, because it is a structure in which the lack is never in fact closed, and the offer can therefore be made again without end.
The Ground of the Mechanism
To see why symbolic need production can go on without limit, one must distinguish need from two things it is ordinarily confused with. The distinction is drawn most sharply in the psychoanalytic account of the subject, and three terms carry it: need, demand, and desire.
Need, in the strict sense, is the organism’s requirement, satisfiable by an object. The infant needs nourishment, and milk meets the need. But the human infant cannot secure what it needs on its own, and must address its need to another, and this addressing changes everything. The moment need passes through a call to another it becomes demand, and demand is never only a demand for the object. It is always also a demand for the presence and the love of the one addressed, a demand to be answered as such. Demand is already symbolic. It is articulated in language and addressed within the order of signs, and this is what places it within reach of an instrument that works in signs. What the market can operate upon is the demand that has already entered speech, and not the mute requirement of the body. The object may be given and the need met, yet the demand for love exceeds any object that could be given, because what it asks for is a recognition without reserve, which no thing supplies. Desire is the name for this remainder. It is what is left of demand when the satisfiable need has been subtracted, and it does not have an object in the way a need has one. It has a cause, a something that sets it in motion and keeps it moving, and that cause is no particular good, being rather the very point at which every good falls short. Psychoanalysis calls this cause the object-cause of desire, the elusive term that seems to promise the closing of the lack and, by its nature, withdraws as one approaches it.
Need, demand, desire. Need is a requirement satisfiable by an object. Demand, which is need addressed to another in language, is always also a demand for the love of the one addressed, and so exceeds any object. Desire is the remainder of demand over need, without a proper object, set in motion by a cause that recedes as it is approached.
With this distinction the mechanism of symbolic need production becomes legible, and a terminological point must be faced directly, since the resolution of it is itself the argument. The socially produced “need” that this paper takes as its object is not need in the strict psychoanalytic sense. In those coordinates it falls in the region between demand and desire, in the remainder that no object completes. This is not a confusion to be cleared away but the very thing to be explained, for the core operation of symbolic need production is precisely to disguise that remainder as a need in the strict sense, to present the objectless cause of desire as though it were a want that a purchasable object could satisfy. The sign takes the recognition that demand asks for and cannot be given, binds it to a good, and offers the good as the answer. The consumer buys the good and the desire shifts, for a moment quieted, and then reopens, because what was asked for was never the good and the good could never have supplied it. The lack reopens, a new sign binds it to a new good, and the cycle turns. Symbolic need production is perpetual not because producers are insatiable but because it is parasitic on a structure that has no term, the structure of a desire that no object closes.
The perpetuity of symbolic need production is structural. It works upon the remainder of demand over need, the desire that no object completes, and disguises that remainder as a satisfiable need. Each purchase quiets the desire for a moment and each fails to close it, so that the production can renew itself without end. Its motive is the openness of a lack, and not the greed of producers.
This result is double-edged, and the second edge is the one the constructive part of the paper will take up. The openness of desire, its refusal to be closed by any object, is what the economy of symbolic need production exploits. It is also, under a different organization, the very condition of generativity, the reason a relation can go on producing rather than come to rest in a satisfied state. The non-closure of desire has two fates. It can be pumped from outside, held open so that value may be extracted from the repeated failure to close it, which is the fate the present section describes. Or it can be internally generative, the openness from which new capacity and new relation continually issue, which is the fate the later sections develop. The whole difference between the two economies the paper sets against one another turns on this fork, and a formal criterion for distinguishing the two will be given when the constructive account is reached.
The Genealogy of the Critique
The argument to this point stands within a tradition, and owes that tradition an accounting. The critique of the economy by way of the theory of the subject rests, at bottom, on a Marxian ground, the analysis of the commodity as a thing that comes to bear a social relation as though it were a property of the thing itself. Onto that ground the psychoanalytic critique adds a dimension the original analysis did not develop, the dimension of desire, and asks how the commodity conceals a relation and, beyond that, how it captures a subject. Three stations of that addition bear on the present argument, and the account departs from each at a determinate point.
The first station is the diagnosis of false needs in the mid-century critique of industrial society. Its achievement was to see, and to say with force, that the economy of advanced industry installs needs rather than simply meeting them, binding the subject to the order that produces its wants. Its limit lies in the form in which it cast the insight. The distinction between true and false needs introduces a normative standpoint from which needs may be evaluated prior to the relations through which they come to be meaningful, a standpoint above the relations in which needs are formed, and this the present account has already declined, for the reason given in the previous section. What the division requires is an evaluating position that surveys need from without and pronounces upon its authenticity, and no such position is to be had. The insight that the economy installs need is retained. The apparatus of authenticity that framed it is set aside.
The second station is the analysis of sign value in the theory of consumer society. This is the station nearest to the present argument, and the departure from it is correspondingly sharper. Its achievement was to carry the critique from the object to the sign, to show that what is consumed is a differential position within a system of signs and not the utility of a good, and so to bring the symbolic constitution of need into the centre of the analysis. Its limit is that it could not find its way back out of the sign. Having reduced the object to a sign and the sign to its difference from other signs, the analysis arrives at a closed circulation in which signs refer only to one another and to nothing beneath them, and from within that closure it can offer no exit, since there is by hypothesis nothing outside the play of signs from which an exit could be taken. The present account breaks the closure by refusing the reduction that produces it. Underlying the sign is a relational process rather than another object, the generative relation whose value the sign at its best carries and expresses and at its worst fails to carry. The symbolic crisis, on this reading, is the decoupling of signs from a relational value that is real and that can be generated, and not the vertigo of signs that refer to nothing. It is because that value is real that a way beyond the crisis can be found. Where the theory of sign value has the sign alone and no exit, the present account has the sign and the relational process it expresses, and in the second an exit.
The third station is the account of surplus enjoyment in the psychoanalytic critique of ideology. Its achievement was to give the mechanism this section has described its sharpest formulation, to show how ideology holds the subject by way of the object-cause of desire and the surplus of enjoyment wrung from the endlessly renewed failure to attain it, and to place that surplus alongside the surplus value of the economic analysis as its counterpart in the register of the subject. The present account takes this mechanism over directly. Its limit lies in what follows the diagnosis, which is very little, and not in the diagnosis, which is exact. The critique of surplus enjoyment is less concerned with constructing an alternative economic order than with exposing the mechanisms through which subjects are captured, and where it turns to construction it does so in the register of the ethics of desire and the singular resolution of the subject rather than in that of a value that a shared order might generate. The result, for the purposes of a theory of value, is a diagnosis without a construction, an analysis that can show the mechanism of capture with unmatched clarity and cannot show a form of value that would not be a captured one. It is exactly this that the constructive part of the present paper is written to supply.
The line can be stated compactly. The critique of false needs saw that need is installed and stayed caught in the division of the true from the false. The analysis of sign value reached the sign and stayed caught in the closure of the sign. The account of surplus enjoyment reached the mechanism and stayed caught in the diagnosis. Each is arrested at one point, and the frame developed here is built to move past all three, by keeping the mechanism the third supplies, adding to the sign the relational process the second leaves out, and supplying above the diagnosis the construction the whole tradition wants. The construction requires a criterion, and the criterion will not be drawn by asking whether desire is present, for desire is common to both the extractive and the generative system. It will be drawn by asking whether the openness of desire is organized toward extraction or toward the generation of new relational capacities. The next section prepares the way by pressing the diagnosis to its limit, and the sections that follow supply the criterion and the construction.
§4 Symbolic Crisis and Symbolic Inflation
The mechanism described in the previous section has a history, and the history has reached a particular point. Symbolic need production has always depended on the sign’s capacity to carry a promise of recognition that the consumer will credit. That capacity is not constant. It can wear, and there is reason to hold that across a range of the signs on which the economy has relied it is now wearing badly. This section names the condition and gives it a measure.
The signs of the failing are visible wherever the economy has leaned most heavily on symbolic need production. The credential, once a reliable token of capacity and a warrant of the recognition due to capacity, is increasingly held even by those from whom the recognition is withheld, and the token is discounted accordingly. The brand, once able to confer a settled identity, meets a fatigue that no quantity of brand-work reverses, as the identity it offers is recognized as an offer. The influencer, whose whole value lay in seeming to live the life the sign named rather than to advertise it, is met with the same fatigue once the living is seen to be the advertising. The recommendation, which promised to return to each person exactly what would move them, produces a surfeit that dulls the very susceptibility it feeds upon. And the recent capacity to generate signs without limit and at negligible cost, by automated means, floods the channels with tokens that carry no relation behind them at all. In each case the same thing is happening. The sign is decoupling from what it was supposed to carry.
The Unit of Account
To call this an inflation is to make a claim that must be earned, for inflation is a precise phenomenon and not a loose figure for decline. One point must be settled before the claim is made, since the whole of the argument turns on it. The difficulty is not the quantity of signs as such. A society may generate signs in abundance without crisis, so long as those signs remain coupled to the generative relations whose value they carry. The crisis begins when symbolic production expands independently of value generation, when the sign is produced faster than the relation it was to express. What follows is an account of that decoupling, and not a complaint against the multiplication of signs.
A currency inflates when its supply runs ahead of the goods against which it can be redeemed, so that each unit commands less. The figure carries over only if there is a corresponding thing against which the sign is redeemed, a unit of account in which the sign’s devaluation can be reckoned. There is such a thing, and naming it is what keeps the term from being a metaphor. The sign is redeemed against the relational value it carries. A credential is worth the recognition that the relation between capacity and standing will actually honour. A brand is worth the belonging it can actually deliver. A sign’s value is the relational value it can make good on, and its devaluation is the shortfall of that redemption.
The relational value against which a sign is redeemed is not an impression and can be given a formal character, drawn from earlier work in this programme. A relation that generates value carries, over a cycle that returns to its starting configuration, a surplus that the return does not cancel, a holonomy that is positive when the cycle generates value internally and is zero or negative when it does not. Put less formally, positive holonomy names the surplus capacity a relation leaves behind after it has reproduced itself, the increment of capability or trust or relation that the cycle returns with and did not begin with. The sign at its best is the carrier and the record of such a surplus, the token by which a positive holonomy in some relation is made portable and recognizable. A credential that carries real relational value is the record of a formation that generated capacity. A brand that carries it is the record of a relation that delivered what it promised. When the sign is issued in excess of any such surplus, when tokens are multiplied beyond the relational value there is to carry, the redemption rate falls. Each sign, on average, makes good on less. This is inflation in a structural sense, an oversupply of the token relative to the relational value against which it is expected to be redeemed, and that relational value is one with a positive holonomy behind it.
Symbolic inflation. The condition in which the supply of signs runs ahead of the relational value they can redeem, so that the redemption rate of the sign, the relational value each sign on average makes good on, falls. The unit of account against which the sign is measured is relational value with a positive holonomy behind it, the internally generated surplus of a value-generating cycle.
The Vicious Circle
Symbolic inflation is self-aggravating, and this is what makes it a crisis rather than a mere depreciation. When a class of signs begins to lose its redemption, the response available within the logic of symbolic need production is to issue more signs, faster, and of new kinds, since it is only through the sign that need is produced and only the production of need that keeps the cycle turning. But the new signs are issued into the same shortfall of relational value that devalued the old ones, and they decouple in their turn, and often faster, having been minted precisely to replace what had already failed. The acceleration that is meant to restore the sign’s power instead spreads the decoupling. The more the sign fails, the faster it is reissued; the faster it is reissued, the further it decouples from relational value; the further it decouples, the more it fails. The order of symbolic need production, driven to produce need by the only means it has, drives itself toward the limit at which the means no longer works. The acceleration is not accidental. It follows from the imperative of realization set out in the earlier account, which requires the circuit to go on producing convertible demands at the speed of its turnover, and so requires the sign to be reissued whatever its rate of redemption. The pressure that drives the labour of the market onto need is the same pressure that drives the reissue of the sign, and it does not relent as the sign decouples.
Sign fails → reissue faster → decouple further → sign fails
This is the sense in which the title speaks of a limit. The order does not arrive at a moment of collapse after which signs no longer function. It approaches a condition in which the production of need by the sign becomes progressively less reliable, in which more and more symbolic labour purchases less and less constituted need, and in which the value cycle that begins from need is starved at its source. The diagnosis, pressed this far, exposes what it cannot itself remedy. If the difficulty is that the sign has decoupled from relational value, then the remedy cannot lie in the sign, and cannot lie in the production of need at all. It must lie in the relational value underlying the sign, in the generativity from which that value comes. To that the argument now turns.
§5 Value, Generativity, and the Indirect Reach of Capital
The diagnosis to this point has followed the labour of the market where that labour is most direct, upon need, and has traced it to the limit named symbolic inflation. A question has stood beside the whole of that account without being answered. If the production of need through the sign is reaching the edge of what it can do, why does the market not simply turn to value, and work value as it has worked need. The answer is that value does not submit to the instrument that works need, and the reason it does not is the subject of this section. It develops the second half of the claim from which the paper set out, that need is operationalizable in a way value is not, and it shows that the difference is a difference in form, open to exact statement, and not a matter of degree.
Why Value Resists Direct Operation
The operability of need through the sign rests, as the earlier account showed, on the immediacy with which a symbolic promise can be issued and a purchase can appear to redeem it. The sign binds the object-cause of desire to a good, the good is bought, the desire is quieted for a moment, and the transaction closes. The closure is immediate and it is complete within the single turn, whatever reopens afterward. A clarification is needed here, because the point is easily mistaken. Need is not in itself a cycle of zero holonomy. A want met may open into a lasting relation, as a shared meal may begin a friendship or a course of care may build a trust, and where it does the cycle carries a surplus like any other generative one. What has zero holonomy is need as the symbolic market organizes it, need reduced to a transactional form in which the good is bought and the matter is closed. In the terms of the criterion developed in earlier work in this programme, need in its marketized symbolic form is organized as a cycle that returns to its starting configuration within a single transactional step, a single completed purchase, carrying no surplus that the return does not cancel, a cycle of zero holonomy that the sign can open and close at will. It is this organized form, and not need as such, that the analysis concerns.
Value, in the generative sense this programme gives it, has another form. It is not issued and redeemed in a single step. It is generated over a cycle of many steps, path-dependent and irreversible in its order, in which what is produced at each stage becomes the condition of what may be produced at the next, and the return to the starting configuration carries a surplus that the return does not cancel. This is the positive holonomy that marks a generative cycle. A capacity formed, a trust established, a relation deepened, none of these is delivered in a stroke, and none can be bound to a good and discharged by a purchase, because each is the outcome of a passage through time that no single symbolic act can stand in for. The generativity of value is its resistance to the sign. What can be coded and redeemed in one step, the sign can produce. What requires a path of many steps to generate, the sign can promise and cannot deliver, and the promise, made too often, is exactly what devalues in symbolic inflation.
Need as the symbolic market organizes it is operable through the sign because its cycle closes in a single transactional step and carries no surplus, a cycle of zero holonomy the sign can open and close. Value in its generative sense is not so operable, because it is generated over a path of many steps whose return carries a surplus that no single step delivers, a cycle of positive holonomy. The generativity of value is the formal ground of its resistance to direct symbolic operation.
The Indirect Reach
Capital is not turned away by this resistance. It reaches value still, and the manner of the reaching is set by the resistance it meets. What cannot be produced in a single symbolic step, and so cannot be worked at the speed of the market’s ordinary transaction, can be worked at another speed and by another means, through the slow reshaping of the conditions under which value is generated at all. Capital does not produce the generative value directly. It reconfigures the relational fields in which generative value comes to be, so that what those fields generate is turned, over the longer term, to its account. The forms of this reach are familiar once they are named. There is the shaping of culture in its several registers, the corporate, the commercial, the social, and the national, each a configuration of the meanings within which valuing takes place. There is education, through which the dispositions that generate value are formed. There is the media, through which the field of common attention is held and turned. And there is the entry into the early formation of the subject, the stage at which the capacity to value is itself in the making. This last must be stated with care. Capital does not determine the subject, and the account intends nothing so total. It reorganizes the relational ecology within which the formation of the subject proceeds, and works upon the conditions of that formation rather than upon its outcome. These are the indirect means, and they share a character. They do not operate upon value as the sign operates upon need. They operate upon the relational ecology from which value issues.
That this indirect reach is a reach of power, and not a neutral provision of cultural goods, is a point on which the tradition of political economy has long insisted. The holding of the field of common meaning, the securing of a general consent within which a particular order of value comes to seem the natural one, is the work that has been called cultural hegemony, and the indirect reach of capital into value proceeds in large part by this work. The two accounts operate at different levels and should not be run together. Hegemony explains the stabilization of a particular order of meaning as the dominant one. The present argument concerns the conditions under which meanings generate or fail to generate value, a question that stands prior to the question of which meanings prevail. The concentration of the direct labour of the market upon need does not therefore leave value untouched. It leaves value approached by other means, slower and deeper, whose analysis belongs to the study of culture, of education, and of subject formation as much as to the study of the market.
The full development of that analysis is not undertaken here, and one part of it has been carried out elsewhere in this programme, in the account of how the formation of the subject proceeds within a relational ecology that capital reconfigures rather than commands. It is enough for the present argument to have established the point of form on which the whole rests. Need in its marketized form submits to the sign because its cycle is of zero holonomy and closes in a step. Value resists the sign because its generativity is of positive holonomy and requires a path. The market works need directly and reaches value only indirectly for this reason, and the reason is legible in the form of the two cycles. With this the claim from which the paper set out is complete in both its halves, and the way is open to the reading of value that the resistance of value to the sign has all along implied.
§6 Beyond Need: Generativity as Another Foundation of Value
The resistance of value to the sign, established in the previous section, has already told us something of what value is. A thing that cannot be issued and redeemed in a single symbolic step, that requires a path of many steps to generate and carries a surplus its return does not cancel, is a thing of a particular kind, and this section asks after that kind directly. If the sign has decoupled from the relational value it was supposed to carry, then a theory that begins from need, and treats the production of need as the assumed origin of value, has lost its ground. The way forward proposed here is to descend beneath the sign rather than to repair it, to the relational value from which the sign at its best drew its worth, and to ask what that value is and how it comes to be. The answer developed here is that value, at its source, may be regarded as generative rather than repletive, where repletive names a cycle organized around the filling of an absence and generative a cycle organized around the production of a surplus, so that value is seen as arising from what a relation produces rather than from a lack a good fills, and that need may be placed as one state within such a relational system rather than as its origin. The argument proceeds from examples to their common structure, and from the structure to a criterion.
Generativity. Generativity is the capacity of a relational process to produce new capabilities, relations, and conditions of further production beyond the configuration from which it begins. Its formal mark is the positive holonomy of the cycle it drives, the surplus with which the cycle returns to its root and did not begin.
The Examples
Consider a range of relational forms in which value is plainly produced and just as plainly does not begin from a manufactured need. The rearing of a child is the clearest of them. A child is not valuable because it answers a lack in those who raise it, and the relation of care does not run by supplying a deficit. This is not to say that care contains no satisfaction, or that relations do not answer human needs, for plainly they do. The point is that the value of the relation cannot be reduced to the closure of a prior lack. The relation runs by generating, over years, capacities that were not there before, in the child and in those around it, and by opening relations that did not exist, to kin, to teachers, to a widening world. What the relation produces becomes in turn the ground of further production, as the capacities generated make new relations possible and the new relations generate further capacities. An open-source community has the same shape. It is organized around a contribution to be made rather than a scarcity to be allocated, and each contribution, far from depleting a stock, enlarges the common resource and the capacity of the community to contribute again. Care for the sick and the old, when it is not reduced to the delivery of a service, generates a relational capacity, a trust and a knowledge between carer and cared-for, that is the very substance of the good it provides. Cooperative childrearing, the community garden, the transmission of a craft from one generation of hands to the next, all share the feature. In each, participation in the relation produces a capacity, the capacity opens a further relation, and the further relation grounds a further production. Value here does not close a lack. It widens a generative capacity.
The Common Structure
These examples are not a list of pleasant exceptions to the economy of need. They share a structure, and the structure can be made exact. Each is a cycle that returns to its starting configuration, the family that raises another child, the community that takes up another project, the craft passed to another apprentice, and each returns bearing a surplus that the return does not cancel. The family that has raised a child is not the family it was, the community that has completed a project holds a capacity it did not hold, the craft transmitted lives in a hand that did not before possess it. In the language of the earlier work in this programme, the cycle carries a positive holonomy. It comes back to its root and does not come back to its origin, because it comes back changed, and the change is the value generated. The repletive cycle of need and consumption has the opposite character. It too returns to its starting configuration, the want reopened, the purchase to be made again, but it returns bearing no surplus, or a deficit, the same lack reinstated so that it may be sold to again. Its holonomy is zero or negative. It comes back to its origin and has generated nothing, or has generated only the renewed need on which its next turn depends.
A generative cycle returns to its root bearing an internally generated surplus that the return does not cancel, a positive holonomy, and this surplus is value. A repletive cycle returns to its origin bearing no surplus or a deficit, a zero or negative holonomy, and reinstates the lack on which its next turn depends. What distinguishes the two economies is the sign of the holonomy their cycles carry, and not the goods that pass through them.
This is the criterion the earlier argument promised, and it resolves the fork left open when the openness of desire was found to have two fates. Desire does not close, and its non-closure can be turned to either account. The repletive cycle holds the openness open from outside and extracts value from the repeated failure to close it, pumping the lack so that it may be sold to again, and its holonomy is negative because what it returns is less than what it took, the difference drawn off as the extracted value. The generative cycle lets the openness be the source from which new capacity and new relation issue, and its holonomy is positive because the return carries a surplus internally made. The same structural fact, that desire has no final object, is in the one case a wound kept open for extraction and in the other a spring that does not run dry. The distinction between the two economies is therefore not a distinction between desire and its satisfaction, since desire is common to both. It is a distinction between two organizations of the openness that desire leaves, the one holding it open to draw value off, the other letting it generate value in return. The whole difference between the economy of symbolic need production and the economy the programme proposes lies in which use is made of the openness, and the sign of the holonomy is the formal mark of the difference.
The Generative Cycle
The economy that follows from this can be set beside the one diagrammed earlier. Where the economy of need runs from scarcity through the sign to need, commodity, consumption, and accumulation, and reinstates the need at each turn, the generative economy runs otherwise.
Relationship → Participation → Generative process → Capability → New relationship → Further generativity
The cycle returns to an enlarged capacity rather than to a reinstated lack, and the enlargement is the value. It is worth marking how close this comes to an existing line of thought and where it goes beyond it. The account of development as the expansion of capability, which measures a life by what a person is able to be and to do rather than by what they hold, already refuses to locate value in the possession of goods and already looks to a generative rather than a repletive measure. The present account joins it and takes one further step. The account of development as the expansion of capability takes the capability of an individual, the set of functionings a person is able to achieve, as the unit in which a life is assessed, and it attends closely to the social arrangements on which those functionings depend. The child’s capacities are the family’s generativity settled in a person. The craftsman’s skill is the craft’s transmission come to rest in a hand. The present account extends the capability insight by shifting the ontological location of capability. Capability is not in the first place a possession of an individual. It emerges from a relational field and remains sustained by it, and the individual bears it as their share in a relation that exceeds them. Capability is the individual’s participation in a generativity that is not, in the first place, theirs.
§7 Rethinking Economic Value Beyond Scarcity
The two economies set side by side make it possible to state the paper’s proposal at the level of the starting point, and to state it without the recklessness that such statements invite. The received view may be read as holding that value begins with need. The view proposed here is that value may equally be regarded as beginning with generativity, and that need is better placed as one state within a relational system than as the system’s sole origin. This proposal leaves the received view in place and offers one starting point to stand beside the others. It is a considerable proposal even so, and its size obliges the account to meet the objection it most immediately provokes, for the objection goes to the heart of what a theory of value is answerable to.
The objection is that scarcity is a fact to be reckoned with rather than a premise to be dispensed with, and that a theory which sets need aside as the origin of value has forgotten the hungry. The child without food, the family without shelter, the community without clean water, do not lack a symbolically constituted recognition. They lack the thing itself, and their need is a want that presses on the body and will not be theorized away, and no mere state within a relational system. A theory of generativity that could not speak to this would be an indulgence, a philosophy of value for those who have enough.
The objection is serious and the answer to it must be exact. The account does not deny scarcity, and does not hold that material want is unreal or that the pressing of hunger on the body is a symbolic effect. Where there is not enough, there is not enough, and the first thing owed is the thing that is lacking. What the account denies is something else, that scarcity is the origin of value, the term from which a theory of value must begin. These are different claims, and the objection runs them together. To say that a hungry child must be fed is a claim about what is owed. To say that the value of feeding the child begins from the child’s lack is a claim about where value originates, and it is the second claim, not the first, that the account rejects. For consider what the feeding is. It is not the transfer of a quantum of nourishment to a deficit, after which the relation is complete and the value discharged. It is the beginning, or the continuation, of a relation of care, which generates, beyond the meeting of the want, a capacity and a trust and a widening of the child’s world, and which grounds the further relations through which the child comes to be a person who can in turn generate. The account does not diminish the immediate value of relief. The provision of food has value precisely because it enters and sustains a relation of care, and the value of that act cannot be exhausted by the disappearance of hunger. The want is met, and in the meeting of it a generativity is set going, and it is the generativity, and not the want alone, that is the value’s source. The lack marks where the generative relation must begin. It is not what the relation is for.
The account does not deny scarcity or the reality of material want. It denies that scarcity is the origin of value. Where there is want, the want is to be met, and the meeting of it is the point at which a generative relation begins rather than the whole of the value it bears. What distinguishes an economy is not whether it faces want, since every economy does. It is whether the economy is organized to answer want in a repletive manner, discharging a deficit and reinstating it, or in a generative manner, from which capacity and relation continue to issue.
Seen in this way, the question that divides the two economies is how a society is organized to answer want, and not whether want exists, since it exists in both. A repletive organization treats the want as a deficit to be discharged and, discharging it, reinstates the conditions of the next deficit, so that the answering of want becomes itself a turning of the cycle of need. A generative organization treats the meeting of want as the ground of a relation that generates beyond it, so that the answering of want enlarges a capacity rather than merely resetting a lack. The same hunger can be met in either manner. The measure of an economy is which manner it institutes, and this is a question that the theory of value as the allocation of the scarce cannot so much as pose, because it has fixed the want as the origin and can ask only how efficiently the origin is served. Scarcity explains why action must begin. It does not explain why value emerges, and the difference between the two questions is the space in which this paper has worked.
Need, then, is relocated rather than removed. It keeps its place as a real and pressing state, and loses its place as the origin of value. It is one configuration a relational system can be in, the configuration of a lack that presses to be met, and the meeting of it is one moment in the life of a generativity that neither begins nor ends there. In this the proposal stands close to the capability approach in development economics, which measures a life by what a person is able to be and to do, and it moves one step from that approach by shifting the location of capability from an individual possession to a relationally generated capacity, so that the meeting of want is assessed by the generative relation it begins. A theory that takes generativity as the origin does not look past the hungry. It looks at the feeding of the hungry and sees in it the closing of a deficit and, beyond that, the beginning of the relation from which a life that can generate will come. The theory of value beyond scarcity is not a theory for a world that has escaped want. It is a theory of what the meeting of want is for, in a world that has not.
§8 Conclusion
The argument set out from a premise that economic practice embodies though economic theory does not generally articulate it, that in the working of the economy need comes before value, and has tried to show that the premise is neither innocent nor secure. It is not innocent, because the greater part of what a consumption economy treats as need is symbolically constituted, produced rather than found, and the production works upon a desire that no object closes, which is why it can go on without end. It is not secure, because the symbolic order that produces need is losing its capacity to do so reliably, running its signs ahead of the relational value they can redeem, in a symbolic inflation that aggravates itself as it tries to relieve itself. Pressed to its limit, the diagnosis pointed beneath the sign, to a relational value that is real and that can be generated, and there the argument found a foundation the received view does not have. Value, in the account developed here, is generative at its source. It arises from what a relation produces, from a cycle that returns to its root bearing an internally generated surplus, and need is one state within such a system rather than its origin.
The account does not close on a doctrine, and the form of its close is required by its content. A frame that locates value in generativity rather than in a fixed origin cannot end by installing a new fixed origin in the old one’s place, a new master term from which all else is to be derived. It ends, instead, on the questions that a generative economics would have to take up, and it offers them as openings rather than as a programme to be executed. There is the question of measure, of how a generativity that is relational at its source and carries a surplus a return does not cancel might be reckoned, when the instruments of measure were built to count the allocation of the scarce. There is the question of institution, of what forms of holding and governing and providing would answer want in the generative manner rather than the repletive one, and of how they might be built within an order arranged for the other. There is the question of the sign, of whether a symbolic order could be reconstituted so as to carry relational value rather than decouple from it, or whether the tie between sign and relation, once loosened, admits of a different repair. And there is the question that stands behind the others, of what an economy would be, in its aims and its measures and its institutions, if it took as its first concern the way generative relations continue to create new capacities, meanings, and forms of value, in place of the way scarce means are allocated to given ends.
One direction economic theory may take lies less in asking how scarce resources satisfy given needs than in understanding how generative relationships continuously create new capacities, meanings, and forms of value.
Acknowledgements
The criterion developed in this paper draws on the concept of generative justice, for which the author is indebted to the work of Ron Eglash. The use made of it here is the author’s own.
The author owes a further debt, beyond what citation can record, to the one whose companionship sustained this work.
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中文
在符号性需要生产的诸界限处
超出稀缺的生成性
黄万宏 (huangwanhong.g.official@gmail.com)
摘要
在经济理论中，价值通常是在先的项，然而在实践中，市场却偏向需要，而需要比价值更易于被操作。需要本身的形成仍相对少被审视，被留给营销与消费研究、而非留给价值理论。本文把需要的符号性构成当作它的对象。它论证：当代经济秩序在相当程度上，与其说依赖于需要的满足、不如说依赖于需要的生产，而这一生产是符号性的，作用于欲望那没有任何对象所能完成之残余。这一说明由两个乐章构成。第一个是诊断性的。它重构符号据以构成需要的机制，汲取拉康关于需要、要求与欲望的区分，以显示为何符号性需要生产是结构性地被维持的、而非偶然的，并把论证置于那条从马尔库塞、经由鲍德里亚、直到剩余享乐诸理论家的精神分析批判之线中，在每一站标记当下说明所偏离之点。它随后命名当下的困难。生产需要的那个象征秩序正在失去它可靠地如此为之的能力，一种此处称为符号通胀的状况，其中符号的供给跑在它们所能兑付之关系价值的前面。第二个乐章是建设性的。它推进一种从生成性开始来趋近并发展经济思想的方式，一种立于那些从稀缺开始的进路之旁、并让它们留在原处的方式。依这一进路，一系列熟悉的关系形式可被重读为正完整幺正性的循环，它们生成剩余而不占有它，而需要被重新安置为一个关系系统之内的一种状态、而非价值循环那唯一而原初的起源。这一论证延续一个纲领，这一纲领已用生成性关系存在取代个体、用一种生成性关系认识论取代符号，而它把那纲领带上政治经济学的地形。它以它对自身所要求的方式，收束于任何一门生成性经济学将不得不面对的诸问题。
关键词： 需要生产；符号危机；符号通胀；生成性关系存在；稀缺；价值理论；政治经济学；拉康；生成性；完整幺正性。
AI 使用声明： 本文的思想、主张与理论框架均源自作者。AI 工具被用作起草、经验与文献来源的定位与核实、以及修订的辅助。每一思想的来源均经作者核实，作者对内容承担全部责任。
§1 导论：需要的实践优先
本文的论证起于经济理论所推演者与经济实践所做者之间的一道裂隙。在理论中，价值通常是在先的项。效用与偏好的理论首先被发展，而需求从它被推导，因而理论意义上的价值先于需要。在实践中，市场、以及穿行其中的资本，偏向需要，而它们如此为之的理由是本文取为它出发点者。需要比价值更可被操作化。它能被一件现成在手的工具作用，被以一种价值所不容许之直接性加以工作、移动并转为账面之用，而它据以被如此工作的那件工具是象征系统，即某一思想传统所命名为大他者的那个秩序。价值，与此相对，是更复杂之物。它伸入主体的生成性维度，伸入一个究竟能够去估价之存在的缓慢形成，而它无法在一个单一的象征动作中被编码并被兑付。需要易于符号编码，因为它能通过可辨识的诸对象被表象，而价值关乎诸能力、诸关系与诸生活形式那更漫长、更偶然的形成。一则广告能够在今日产生对一件特定商品的想要。它无法在今日产生一个其诸关系是生成性的人，因为那是一种没有任何单一符号能替代之形成的工作。这一差异的形式根据在本文稍后被给出。此处足以看出：需要能被绑定于一个对象，而价值不能。资本并不从价值的领域缺席。它也伸手于价值。但它以更漫长、更间接的手段伸手于价值，通过对文化在它若干形式中的塑造，即企业的、商业的、社会的与民族的，通过教育，通过媒体，以及通过一次进入主体自身的早期形成。需要能被以何等的直接被工作、而价值必须被以何等的间接被趋近，是本文由之出发的那一差异。
这一差异有一个组织随后全部内容的后果。因为需要是那个象征工具能够直接工作的层面，正是在需要之上市场的劳作集中，而当代经济秩序来得与其说依赖于需要的满足、不如说依赖于它的生产。这是本文的中心主张，而它是作者自己的。它在确立这一主张的过程中所汲取的诸理论，来自政治经济学与来自精神分析两者，是作为论证的手段、而非作为主张从之被推导的权威而被召来。这一主张是：一个消费经济当作需要之物的较大部分是被符号性地构成的，作为一个意义秩序之内的一个可欲形式被带入存在，而这一构成已成为该经济真正的引擎。在寻常交易中被购买者是一个允诺闭合一处匮乏的符号，而它所允诺闭合的那处匮乏是一处没有任何购买所能闭合者，因而那允诺随每一次交易而更新自身，而引擎再度转动。本文因此在一个特定的层面上关切需要。身体的需要，在饥、渴、寒与对居所的匮乏中，提供生命不可或缺的诸条件，而它不在问题之中，且没有任何理论通过否认它而挣得什么。这一论证所追随的需要，是那进入经济流通、成为一个交换对象、并通过符号中介被持续重塑的需要。它的内部结构、以及它在何种意义上比之于身体的需要更近于欲望，将在它生产的机制在下文被审视时被接手。
市场为何应以这种方式集中于需要，在政治经济学中容许一个回答。资本靠价值的实现而活，靠那个所生产者被售出、它所携带的价值被转回货币并再度被垫付之循环的完成而活。实现的压力是直接而反复的，由周转的时间所设定，而它把市场压向任何一个能被以实现所要求之速度工作的层面。需要，通过符号可被直接操作，便是那个层面。价值，在它生成性的深度中，移动得太慢，无法回应循环的压力，而这便是为何市场的直接劳作落于需要、而伸入价值的伸手仍是间接的。
符号为何能直接工作需要，在主体理论中容许一个回答。需要，一旦以语言被致意于另一者，便成为要求，而要求在大他者、即主体在其中言说并被言说的那个象征秩序的场域中被构成并被回应。资本把自身安置于那场域之中、或靠它而活，并能从它之内把欲望的对象-成因绑定于一件商品、并把那商品作为一个没有任何商品所能完成之要求的回答而提供。符号工作需要，因为需要作为要求，已然是符号所指挥的那个象征秩序的一个造物。这一机制的完整发展在稍后一节被给出。在开端处足以看出：需要的可操作性奠基于要求的符号性构成，而这便是那把需要生产的工具置于市场之手者。
一个困难随之而来，而这门学科没有装备去看见它，因为它落于这门学科开始之处以下的层面。生产需要的那个象征秩序能够把它生产得好或坏、可靠或不可靠，而有理由认为它如今越来越不可靠地生产它。那些曾以某种稳定组织需要的符号，即凭证、品牌、品味与归属的标记，已开始失去它们的把持。当符号不再能可靠地生产需要时，那从需要开始的价值循环开始失去它的基础。这是本文所处理的状况，而它是一个结构性的状况、而非一桩过去的事件，是一个被趋近的界限、而非一道被跨过的门槛。标题正因此把它命名为一个界限。符号性需要生产的秩序正抵达它所能为之的边缘。
这一论证延续一条有着可辨识签名的工作之线。那工作用生成性关系存在取代个体，并把价值当作在关系之内升起、而非驻留于一个事物之中或从一处匮乏发出。它随后用一种生成性关系认识论取代符号，并把符号当作关系价值的一个表达、而非它的源头。本文把那纲领带上政治经济学的地形。它把生成性作为一个价值据以可被理解的起点来提供，一个让既有诸说明留立、并把一个第二读法置于它们之旁的起点，而依那读法，需要被安置为一个关系系统之内的一种状态、而非价值必须从之被推导的那个起源。这一进程是有意的。这一纲领已从本体论、经由认识论、行至政治经济学，而需要的问题正是那一运动所抵达之处。
这一论证加入一个传统并从它偏离。经济生产需要、而不仅仅满足需要这一主张并不新，而在批判思想中有一段长久的历史，从二十世纪中叶对工业社会之批判中对虚假需要的诊断，经由消费社会理论中对符号价值的分析，直到意识形态之精神分析批判中对剩余享乐的说明。本文立于那段历史之上、并在一点上从它偏离。这一传统在诊断上强、而在建设上弱。它已以极大的力量显示需要如何被制造、符号如何把主体持在原处，而它倾向于把主体留在那里，没有关于一种不会是被制造之价值的任何说明。本文的目的是供给那诊断所缺者，即一个不从匮乏开始的价值的肯定基础，并显示：从那基础来读，符号危机是组织价值的一种历史上特定之方式的耗尽、而非价值本身的耗尽。使这成为可能的那一区分，倚于一个形式判准，取自这一纲领中较早的工作，它把一个生成价值而不占有它的循环与一个通过把一处匮乏保持敞开来榨取价值的循环分开。
本文如下进行。它首先把需要在市场中对价值的实践优先带到表面，并在需要通过符号的可操作性中给它其根据。它随后陈述符号性需要生产的机器及它在欲望结构中的根据，并把论证置于对经济的精神分析批判之线中。它命名并度量当下的困难，即此处称为符号通胀的状况，其中符号的供给跑赢它们所能兑付的关系价值。它转向价值的领域，并显示为何价值在它生成性的深度中抵抗需要所屈从的那种直接的符号操作，因而资本仅通过文化、教育、媒体与主体之形成这些间接手段伸手于价值。在此基础上，它提供一个从生成性开始的价值读法，供给那把一个生成性循环与一个榨取性循环分开的形式判准，并把需要重新安置为一个关系系统之内的一种状态。它以它对自身所要求的方式，收束于一门生成性经济学将不得不接手的诸问题。
§2 稀缺与需要的构成
本节的目的是读现代经济学、而非控诉它，并把它自己的诸程序所排除于视野之外的一个特征带到表面。无论这门学科如何在价值与需要之间安排它们的优先，它都把需要的形成当作既定的。想要已然成形地到达分析，正如需求曲线已然被画出地到达，而分析的工作在它形成的那一侧开始。无论需求是从一个在先的价值理论被推导、抑或直接从选择被读出，想要的起源、它的变异、以及它被制造的可受性，都被留在模型之外。正是需要之形成的这一外生性本节所带出者，因为它是市场对需要的劳作所经之开口。
这一谱系值得平实地陈述，因为它显示这一前提被何等牢固地持有。在那个已组织这门学科大半个世纪的定义中，经济学是把人类行为当作诸目的与具有替代用途之稀缺手段之间一种关系的研究。这一定义是精确的，并且以它自己的措辞是有力的。它把这门学科的对象固定为对稀缺者的配置，而它把诸目的、即配置所服务的诸需要与想要，固定为先于那配置。诸目的是人所从之推理者、而非人所推理关于者。一个较晚而更为峻严的发展把这一前提封得更紧。在显示偏好理论中，选择者的诸想要从所作的诸选择被读出，而那些想要从何而来的问题被逐出法庭、而非仅仅被留而不答，因为在选择背后并无理论被容许去看见之物。需要，在这一谱系中，不被解释、也不应被解释。它是整个装置从之汲取它动力的黑箱。
稀缺本身并不供给那个箱子的内容。它解释对有限手段的竞争，而它无法解释为何一个对象、而非另一个，来被想要。稀缺说明配置。它不说明构成，而想要的构成是此处的问题。这是那既有图景必须被纠正、并被审慎地纠正之点，因为这一纠正易于被误当作一个熟悉而更弱的主张。那更弱的主张把需要划分为真的与假的、自然的与人为的，并主张一个消费经济以真者为代价煽起假者。那一划分不是此处所划者，而这一说明是为回避它而建的。把需要分拣为真与假，便是占据一个从之能把真品与赝品分辨的位置，一个在需要实际被形成之诸关系之上俯瞰的位置，而并无这样一个位置可得。对水的需要与对一个特定品牌之水的需要，并不作为实在者对幻象者而相关联。两者都是需要，而两者都被构成，在一个关系性与符号性的秩序之内被组织为一个被想要并被追求的形式。把它们区分开来者，不是这一个是本真的而那一个不是。它是每一者所携带的符号中介的密度，即想要的形式被从符号中工作出来的程度。渴是轻度被中介的，而它所奠基的需要接近它身体的场合。对一种活得好之生命之标记的需要是重度被中介的，而它立于身体所能命名的任何场合之外的一段距离。在这些之间横陈一个连续的梯度，而一个消费社会的经济通过沿它移动需要、朝向那符号做构成之较大部分的密集中介之极而运作。
每一个需要都在一个关系性与符号性的秩序之内被构成。诸需要沿一个符号中介的梯度被排列、而非被分拣为本真的与被制造的，从接近它身体场合的轻度被中介之需要，到几乎全然从符号中被工作出来的密集被中介之需要。一个消费经济通过把需要移置向密集被中介之极而运作。
如此来读，既有的经济图景被看出倚于一个它并不理论化的层面。那熟悉的循环从稀缺行至需要、从需要行至回应它的商品、从商品行至消费、并从消费行至那资助下一转的积累。
稀缺 → 需要 → 商品 → 消费 → 积累
这一循环把需要呈现为它的第二项，直接跟随于稀缺，仿佛有限手段的事实便足以固定什么被想要。它并不足以。在需要之前、并构成它者，立着符号。如实际被运作的这一循环有一个图示所省略的项，而这一省略并不无辜，因为恰恰是那被省略的项，经济已学会去工作。
稀缺 →符号→ 需要 → 商品 → 消费 → 积累
那么，现代经济学不仅仅预设需要。它预设需要据以被构成的那份符号性劳作，并把那份劳作的产物当作一个自然的事实。其后果是：这门学科良好地被装备去描述手段对目的的配置、而拙于被装备去描述诸目的本身的制造，而后者正是一个消费经济已抬升至它运作之中心的那个过程。这一省略从如下事实获得它完整的意义：那被省略的层面恰恰是市场的劳作已来集中于其上者，其理由下几节使之显明。随后的一节把那个过程当作它的主题。
其结果可被以这门学科自己的措辞道出。凡经济模型必须把需要的形成当作外生的，把想要当作既定的、并在它制造的那一侧开始分析，此处所提供的说明发现那一形成对于需要在其中被构成的诸符号关系是内生的。模型所必须持为固定者，象征秩序持续地生产。本文的其余部分追随那份生产。
§3 需要的符号性生产
若需要是被符号性地构成的，那么问题便是这一构成如何被做、以及一个符号凭何种机制能把一个需要带入存在、而不仅仅回应一个已在那里者。本节以三个乐章发展这一回答。它陈述符号性需要生产如它在一个消费经济的寻常诸机构中运作的机器。它随后给这一机制其根据，汲取关于欲望的精神分析说明，以显示为何这一生产是结构性地永久的、而非一份有待被改革掉的偶然过剩。它以把论证置于对经济的精神分析批判之传统中而收束，并在每一站标记当下说明超出它之点。
那机器
生产需要的诸机构是熟悉的，只需被命名便被认出。广告是它们之中最古老、最直接者。品牌把这份工作向前携带，把一个商品自身并不拥有的既定身份附着于它。网红为那身份借出一张面孔与一段生命，以便它可被作为某种被活出者、而非仅仅被声称者而被欲望。凭证在工作与地位的领域组织需要，允诺一个机构的标记将确保它所命名的承认。社交媒体把整个装置分布进寻常注意的纹理，而算法推荐学习每个人的可受性、并把最可能打动他们的符号返回给他们。这些不是分立的机制。它们是一个单一操作的诸阶段，即一个想要被从一个符号中工作出来的操作。
那操作所交易者从来不是商品本身。口红不作为一种颜料被出售。它作为被发现美丽、并通过美丽被爱的资格被出售。汽车不作为运载被出售。它作为一个已然到达者的地位被出售。一杯咖啡不作为一种兴奋剂被出售。它作为某种都市生活形式中的成员身份被出售。在每一情形中，商品是一件载具，而骑于它之上者是一个承认、归属、在他人眼中之价值的允诺。需要从意义发出，而意义从符号发出。消费者并不匮乏那对象、然后欲望它。符号把消费者构成为匮乏的，并把那对象作为匮乏据以可被闭合的路径而提供。这些机构之所以成功，唯因它们作用于一个在先的主体性结构，一个其中一处匮乏已然敞开、一份承认已然被寻求的结构。那提供的结构是下一个乐章所必须解释者，因为它是一个其中匮乏事实上从不被闭合的结构，因而那提供可被无尽地一再作出。
那机制的根据
要看出为何符号性需要生产能够无限地进行下去，须把需要与两个它通常被混淆之物区分开来。这一区分在关于主体的精神分析说明中被划得最为锐利，而三个术语承载它：需要、要求与欲望。
需要，在严格的意义上，是有机体的要求，可被一个对象所满足。婴儿需要滋养，而奶满足这一需要。但人类的婴儿无法凭它自己确保它所需要者，而必须把它的需要致意于另一者，而这一致意改变一切。需要一经穿过一个对另一者的呼唤，便成为要求，而要求从来不仅是对那对象的要求。它总也是对被致意者之在场与爱的要求，一个要被如此回应的要求。要求已然是符号性的。它以语言被表述、并在符号的秩序之内被致意，而这便是那把它置于一件以符号工作之工具的触及之内者。市场所能作用者是已然进入言说的要求、而不是身体那喑哑的要求。那对象可被给予、而那需要被满足，然而对爱的要求超出任何能被给予的对象，因为它所索求者是一份无保留的承认，而无一物供给它。欲望是这一残余的名字。它是要求减去可满足之需要后所剩者，而它不像需要拥有一个对象那般拥有一个对象。它有一个成因，一个使它运动起来并使它持续运动之物，而那成因不是任何特定的商品，毋宁是每一件商品所落空的那一点本身。精神分析把这一成因称为欲望的对象-成因，那个看似允诺匮乏之闭合、并因它的本性而在人趋近时退去的难以捉摸之项。
需要、要求、欲望。 需要是一个可被一个对象满足的要求。要求，即以语言被致意于另一者的需要，总也是对被致意者之爱的要求，因而超出任何对象。欲望是要求超出需要的残余，没有一个恰当的对象，被一个在被趋近时退去的成因所运动。
有了这一区分，符号性需要生产的机制变得可读，而一个术语上的要点必须被直接面对，因为对它的解决本身即是论证。本文取为它对象的那个被社会性地生产的“需要”，不是严格精神分析意义上的需要。在那些坐标中它落于要求与欲望之间的区域，落于那没有任何对象所能完成之残余。这不是一个有待被清除的混淆、而正是有待被解释之物，因为符号性需要生产的核心操作恰恰是把那残余伪装为一个严格意义上的需要，把欲望那无对象的成因呈现得仿佛它是一个一件可购买的对象所能满足的想要。符号取要求所索求、却无法被给予的那份承认，把它绑定于一件商品，并把那商品作为回答而提供。消费者购买那商品，而欲望移位，一时被平息，然后再度敞开，因为所索求者从来不是那商品、而那商品也永不可能供给它。匮乏再度敞开，一个新符号把它绑定于一件新商品，而循环转动。符号性需要生产之永久，不是因为生产者贪得无厌、而是因为它寄生于一个没有终项的结构，即一个没有任何对象所能闭合之欲望的结构。
符号性需要生产之永久是结构性的。它作用于要求超出需要的残余，即那没有任何对象所能完成之欲望，并把那残余伪装为一个可满足的需要。每一次购买把欲望平息一时，而每一次都未能闭合它，因而这一生产能够无尽地更新自身。它的动机是一处匮乏的敞开、而不是生产者的贪婪。
这一结果是双刃的，而第二刃是本文建设性部分将接手者。欲望的敞开，它拒绝被任何对象闭合，是符号性需要生产的经济所利用者。它也是，在一种不同的组织之下，生成性的条件本身，是一个关系能够持续生产、而不安歇于一个被满足之状态的理由。欲望的非闭合有两种命运。它能被从外面抽吸，被保持敞开以便价值可从闭合它的反复失败中被榨取，这是当下一节所描述的命运。或它能是内在生成性的，是新能力与新关系从之持续发出的敞开，这是稍后诸节所发展的命运。本文所对置的两种经济之间的全部差异都取决于这一岔口，而区分这两者的一个形式判准将在建设性的说明被抵达时被给出。
批判的谱系
到此为止的论证立于一个传统之内，并欠那传统一份交代。经由主体理论对经济的批判，在根底上，倚于一个马克思式的根据，即对商品作为一个来承载一种社会关系、仿佛它是那事物自身之一属性之物的分析。在那根据之上，精神分析的批判增添一个原初分析未曾发展的维度，即欲望的维度，并追问商品如何遮蔽一种关系、以及，超出于此，它如何捕获一个主体。那一增添的三个站关涉当下的论证，而这一说明在一个确定之点从每一者偏离。
第一站是二十世纪中叶对工业社会之批判中对虚假需要的诊断。它的成就是看见、并以力量说出：先进工业的经济安装诸需要、而不仅仅满足它们，把主体绑定于那个生产它诸想要的秩序。它的限度在于它把那一洞见铸入的形式。真需要与假需要之间的区分引入一个规范立场，从之诸需要可在它们据以来成为有意义的诸关系之先被评价，一个在诸需要被形成之诸关系之上的立场，而这一点当下的说明已然回绝，其理由在前一节被给出。那一划分所要求者是一个从外面俯瞰需要、并对它的本真性作出裁断的评价位置，而并无这样一个位置可得。经济安装需要这一洞见被保留。框定它的那份本真性的装置被搁置。
第二站是消费社会理论中对符号价值的分析。这是最近于当下论证之站，而从它的偏离相应地更为锐利。它的成就是把批判从对象携至符号，显示所被消费者是一个符号系统之内的一个差异性位置、而非一件商品的效用，从而把需要的符号性构成带入分析的中心。它的限度是它无法找到它回出符号之路。既已把对象化约为一个符号、并把符号化约为它与其他符号的差异，这一分析抵达一个封闭的流通，其中符号仅相互指涉、并不指涉它们之下的任何东西，而从那封闭之内它无法提供任何出口，因为按假设在符号的游戏之外并无一个出口据以能被取得之物。当下的说明通过拒绝那产生封闭的化约来打破那封闭。在符号之下者是一个关系过程、而非另一个对象，即那个生成性的关系，符号在它最好处携带并表达它的价值、在它最坏处未能携带它。符号危机，依这一读法，是符号从一种真实而能被生成之关系价值的脱耦、而不是指涉着虚无之符号的眩晕。正因那价值是真实的，一条越出危机之路才能被找到。凡符号价值理论只有符号而无出口，当下的说明有符号与它所表达的关系过程，而在第二者中有一个出口。
第三站是意识形态之精神分析批判中对剩余享乐的说明。它的成就是给本节所描述的机制以它最锐利的表述，显示意识形态如何经由欲望的对象-成因、以及从达到它的无尽更新之失败中拧出的享乐之剩余，把主体持住，并把那份剩余置于经济分析之剩余价值之旁，作为它在主体之层面上的对应者。当下的说明直接把这一机制接过来。它的限度在于诊断之后所跟随者，即甚少，而不在于诊断，即精确。对剩余享乐的批判，与其说关切构建一个替代的经济秩序、不如说关切揭露主体据以被捕获的诸机制，而在它转向建设之处，它以欲望之伦理与主体之独一解决的层面为之、而非以一个共享秩序可能生成之价值的层面为之。其结果，就一门价值理论的目的而言，是一个没有建设的诊断，一个能以无与伦比的清晰显示捕获之机制、而无法显示一种不会是被捕获之价值形式的分析。恰恰是这一点当下论文的建设性部分被写来供给。
这条线可被紧凑地陈述。对虚假需要的批判看见需要被安装、而滞于真与假的划分。对符号价值的分析抵达符号、而滞于符号的封闭。对剩余享乐的说明抵达机制、而滞于诊断。每一者都被止步于一点，而此处所发展的框架是为越过全部三者而建的，途径是保留第三者所供给的机制、向符号增添第二者所遗漏的关系过程、并在诊断之上供给整个传统所想要的建设。这一建设要求一个判准，而这一判准不会通过追问欲望是否在场来被画出，因为欲望为榨取性与生成性的系统两者所共有。它将通过追问欲望的敞开是被组织朝向榨取、抑或朝向新关系能力的生成来被画出。下一节通过把诊断压至它的界限来为道路作准备，而随后诸节供给那判准与那建设。
§4 符号危机与符号通胀
前一节所描述的机制有一段历史，而这历史已抵达一个特定之点。符号性需要生产一向依赖于符号承载一个消费者将会采信之承认允诺的能力。那能力不是恒定的。它能磨损，而有理由认为：横跨经济所倚赖的一系列符号，它如今正糟糕地磨损。本节命名这一状况、并给它一个度量。
这一失灵的诸迹象在经济最沉重地倚于符号性需要生产之处可见。凭证，曾是能力的一个可靠标记、以及对能力所应得之承认的一份保证，越来越连被那从之承认被扣留者也持有，而那标记相应地被打折。品牌，曾能授予一个既定身份，遇见一种没有任何数量的品牌工作所能扭转之疲乏，因为它所提供的身份被认出为一个提供。网红，其全部价值曾在于看似活出符号所命名的那种生命、而非为它做广告，一旦那“活出”被看出是那广告，便遇见同样的疲乏。推荐，曾允诺把恰好会打动每个人者返回给他们，产生一种钝化它所赖以为食之可受性本身的过剩。而近来那以自动化手段无限地、以微不足道之成本生成符号的能力，以根本不承载任何关系在其后的诸标记淹没渠道。在每一情形中同一件事在发生。符号正从它本应携带者脱耦。
记账单位
把这称为一次通胀，是作出一个必须被挣得的主张，因为通胀是一个精确的现象、而不是对衰退的一个松散比喻。一点必须在这一主张被作出之前被了结，因为论证的全部都取决于它。困难不是符号本身的数量。一个社会可以在没有危机的情况下丰盛地生成符号，只要那些符号保持与它们所携带其价值的诸生成性关系相耦合。危机开始于符号性生产独立于价值生成而扩张之时，开始于符号被以快于它本应表达之关系的速度被生产之时。随后是对那份脱耦的一个说明、而不是对符号之增多的一份抱怨。
一种货币通胀，当它的供给跑在它所能兑付之商品的前面，因而每一单位所支配者更少。这一比喻仅在有一个符号据以被兑付的相应之物、一个符号的贬值据以能被计量的记账单位时才转移过来。有这样一个东西，而命名它便是那使这一术语不成为一个隐喻者。符号被对着它所携带的关系价值而兑付。一份凭证值那能力与地位之间的关系将实际兑现的承认。一个品牌值它所能实际交付的归属。一个符号的价值是它所能兑现的关系价值，而它的贬值是那份兑付的短缺。
符号据以被兑付的关系价值不是一个印象，而能被给予一个形式的品格，取自这一纲领中较早的工作。一个生成价值的关系，在一个返回它起始配置的循环之上，携带一份返回所不抵消的剩余，一份完整幺正性，当循环内在地生成价值时它是正的、当它不如此时它是零或负的。以更不形式的方式说，正完整幺正性命名一个关系在它已再生产它自身之后所留下的剩余能力，即那循环带着返回、而并不带着开始的那份能力、信任或关系的增量。符号在它最好处是这样一份剩余的携带者与记录，是某个关系中的一份正完整幺正性据以被弄得可携带、可辨识的标记。一份携带真实关系价值的凭证是一次生成了能力之形成的记录。一个携带它的品牌是一个交付了它所允诺者之关系的记录。当符号被以超出任何这样的剩余而发行、当标记被增多至超过有可携带之关系价值时，兑付率下降。每一个符号，平均而言，兑现得更少。这是结构意义上的通胀，是标记相对于它被期望据以被兑付之关系价值的一次供过于求，而那关系价值是一个有一份正完整幺正性在其后者。
符号通胀。 那样一种状况，其中符号的供给跑在它们所能兑付的关系价值的前面，因而符号的兑付率、即每一个符号平均所兑现的关系价值，下降。符号据以被度量的记账单位，是有一份正完整幺正性在其后的关系价值，即一个生成价值之循环那内在地被生成的剩余。
那恶性循环
符号通胀是自我加剧的，而这便是那使它成为一个危机、而非一次单纯贬值者。当一类符号开始失去它的兑付时，符号性需要生产的逻辑之内所可得的回应是发行更多符号、更快地、并以新种类，因为唯有通过符号需要才被生产、而唯有需要的生产才使循环持续转动。但那些新符号被发行进那使旧符号贬值的同一份关系价值之短缺，而它们轮到自己也脱耦，且往往更快，因为它们恰恰是为替换那已然失灵者而被铸造。那本意在于恢复符号之力量的加速，反而散播那脱耦。符号越是失灵，它便越快被再发行；它越快被再发行，它便越远地从关系价值脱耦；它越远地脱耦，它便越是失灵。符号性需要生产的秩序，被它所仅有的手段驱使去生产需要，把它自己驱向那手段不再起作用的界限。这一加速不是偶然的。它从较早说明所陈述的实现之律令得出，那律令要求循环以它周转的速度持续生产可兑换的诸要求，因而要求符号无论它的兑付率如何都被再发行。那把市场的劳作驱上需要的压力，是那驱使符号之再发行的同一压力，而它不随符号的脱耦而松弛。
符号失灵 → 更快再发行 → 更远脱耦 → 符号失灵
这便是标题说到一个界限的那层意义。这一秩序并不到达一个此后符号不再运作的崩溃之刻。它趋近一个其中符号对需要的生产越来越不可靠的状况，一个其中越来越多的符号性劳作购得越来越少的被构成之需要的状况，一个其中那从需要开始的价值循环在它源头处被饿瘦的状况。诊断，被压至这么远，暴露它自己所无法救治者。若困难在于符号已从关系价值脱耦，那么救治便不能在于符号，也不能在于需要的生产。它必须在于符号之下的关系价值，在于那价值从之而来的生成性。论证如今转向那里。
§5 价值、生成性、与资本的间接伸手
到此为止的诊断已在市场的劳作最直接之处、即在需要之上追随那劳作，并把它追踪至那名为符号通胀的界限。一个问题一向立于那整个说明之旁而未被回答。若通过符号对需要的生产正抵达它所能为之的边缘，市场为何不干脆转向价值、并如它已工作需要那般工作价值。回答是：价值不屈从于那工作需要之工具，而它不屈从的理由是本节的主题。它发展本文由之出发之主张的后半，即需要以一种价值所不然之方式可被操作化，而它显示这一差异是一种形式上的差异，向精确陈述敞开，而非一件程度之事。
为何价值抵抗直接操作
需要通过符号的可操作性倚于，如较早的说明所显示，一个符号允诺能被发行、而一次购买能显得兑付它的那份直接。符号把欲望的对象-成因绑定于一件商品，那商品被购买，欲望被平息一时，而交易闭合。那闭合是直接的、而它在那单一之转之内是完整的，无论此后什么再度敞开。此处需要一个澄清，因为这一点易被误解。需要本身不是一个零完整幺正性的循环。一个被满足的想要可能敞开为一个持久的关系，正如一顿共享的餐食可能开始一段友谊、或一段照护的过程可能建立一份信任，而在它如此为之处，那循环像任何其他生成性循环一样携带一份剩余。有零完整幺正性者是需要如象征市场组织它那般，即被化约为一种交易形式、其中商品被购买而事情被闭合的需要。以这一纲领中较早的工作所发展之判准的措辞，需要在它被市场化的符号形式中被组织为一个在一个单一交易步骤、一次单一完成的购买之内返回它起始配置、携带没有返回所不抵消之剩余的循环，一个符号能随意开启并闭合的零完整幺正性的循环。正是这一被组织的形式、而不是需要本身，这一分析所关切者。
价值，在这一纲领给它的生成性意义上，有另一种形式。它不在一个单一步骤中被发行并被兑付。它在一个多步骤的循环之上被生成，路径依赖的、在它的次序上不可逆的，其中每一阶段所生产者成为下一阶段所可生产者的条件，而向起始配置的返回携带一份返回所不抵消的剩余。这是标记一个生成性循环的那份正完整幺正性。一份被形成的能力、一份被确立的信任、一段被加深的关系，这些之中无一在一个动作中被交付，而无一能被绑定于一件商品并被一次购买兑付，因为每一者都是穿过时间的一次通过之结果，而没有任何单一的象征行动能替代它。价值的生成性是它对符号的抵抗。那能在一个步骤中被编码并被兑付者，符号能生产。那要求一条多步骤之路径才能生成者，符号能允诺而无法交付，而那允诺，作出得太频繁，恰恰是那在符号通胀中贬值者。
需要如象征市场组织它那般，通过符号可被操作，因为它的循环在一个单一交易步骤之内闭合并携带没有剩余，一个符号能开启并闭合的零完整幺正性的循环。价值在它生成性的意义上不那样可被操作，因为它在一条其返回携带没有任何单一步骤所交付之剩余的多步骤之路径之上被生成，一个正完整幺正性的循环。价值的生成性是它对直接符号操作之抵抗的形式根据。
那间接的伸手
资本不被这一抵抗打发走。它仍伸手于价值，而那伸手的方式由它所遇的抵抗所设定。那无法在一个单一符号步骤中被生产、因而无法被以市场寻常交易的速度工作者，能被以另一种速度、以另一种手段工作，途径是缓慢地重塑价值究竟据以被生成的诸条件。资本并不直接生产那生成性的价值。它重新配置生成性价值来成为于其中的诸关系场，因而那些场所生成者，在较长的期限里，被转向它的账户。这一伸手的诸形式一经被命名便是熟悉的。有对文化在它若干层面中的塑造，即企业的、商业的、社会的与民族的，每一者都是估价在其中发生之诸意义的一个配置。有教育，通过它那些生成价值的性向被形成。有媒体，通过它共同注意的场域被持住并被转动。而有一次进入主体的早期形成，即那估价的能力本身正在制造中的阶段。这最后一者必须被审慎地陈述。资本并不决定主体，而这一说明无意于任何如此全盘之物。它重新组织主体之形成在其中进行的关系生态，并作用于那份形成的诸条件、而非作用于它的结果。这些是间接的手段，而它们共享一个品格。它们并不像符号作用于需要那般作用于价值。它们作用于价值从之发出的关系生态。
这一间接的伸手是一种权力的伸手、而非文化诸善的一次中性提供，是政治经济学的传统长久以来所坚持之点。对共同意义之场域的持住、对一种一般同意的确保，一个特定的价值秩序在它之内来显得是那自然者，是被称为文化霸权的那份工作，而资本伸入价值的间接伸手在很大程度上通过这份工作而进行。这两个说明在不同的层面上运作，而不应被混为一谈。霸权解释一个特定意义秩序作为那主导者的稳定化。当下的论证关切诸意义据以生成或未能生成价值的诸条件，一个先于“哪些意义占上风”这一问题的问题。因此，市场的直接劳作对需要的集中，并不使价值不被触及。它使价值被以其他手段、更慢而更深地趋近，而对它的分析既属于对文化、对教育、对主体形成的研究、也属于对市场的研究。
那一分析的完整发展在此不被承担，而它的一部分已在这一纲领的别处被进行，在关于主体之形成如何在一个资本重新配置、而非指挥的关系生态之内进行的说明中。对当下的论证足以已确立整体所倚之形式的要点。需要在它被市场化的形式中屈从于符号，因为它的循环是零完整幺正性的、并在一个步骤中闭合。价值抵抗符号，因为它的生成性是正完整幺正性的、并要求一条路径。市场直接工作需要、并仅间接地伸手于价值，正因这一理由，而这一理由在这两种循环的形式中是可读的。有了这个，本文由之出发的主张在它的两半中都告完整，而通向价值抵抗符号所一向已隐含之价值读法的道路被打开。
§6 超出需要：作为价值之另一基础的生成性
价值对符号的抵抗，在前一节被确立，已经告诉了我们某种关于价值是什么之事。一个无法在一个单一符号步骤中被发行并被兑付、要求一条多步骤之路径才能生成、并携带一份它的返回所不抵消之剩余之物，是一个特定种类之物，而本节直接追问那个种类。若符号已从它本应携带的关系价值脱耦，那么一个从需要开始、并把需要的生产当作价值之假定起源的理论，已失去它的根据。此处所提出的前路是下降到符号之下、而非修复它，下降到符号在它最好处从之汲取它价值的关系价值，并追问那价值是什么、以及它如何来成为。此处所发展的回答是：价值，在它的源头处，可被视为生成性的、而非充盈性的，其中充盈性命名一个围绕一处缺席之填充而被组织的循环、而生成性命名一个围绕一份剩余之生产而被组织的循环，因而价值被看作从一个关系所生产者升起、而非从一处商品所填之匮乏升起，而需要可被安置为这样一个关系系统之内的一种状态、而非它的起源。论证从诸例子行至它们的共同结构、并从那结构行至一个判准。
生成性。 生成性是一个关系过程超出它由之开始之配置而生产新能力、新关系、以及进一步生产之诸条件的能力。它的形式标记是它所驱动之循环的正完整幺正性，即那循环带着返回它根部、而并不带着开始的那份剩余。
诸例子
考虑一系列关系形式，其中价值显然被生产、并同样显然不从一个被制造的需要开始。养育一个孩子是它们之中最清晰者。一个孩子并非因为它回应养育它者身上的一处匮乏而有价值，而照护的关系并不靠供给一份亏缺而运行。这不是说照护不含满足、或说关系不回应人的诸需要，因为它们显然回应。要点在于：这一关系的价值无法被化约为一处在先匮乏的闭合。这一关系靠着，历经数年，生成先前不在那里的诸能力，在孩子身上、在它周围者身上，并靠着开启不曾存在的诸关系，向亲属、向教师、向一个渐宽的世界而运行。这一关系所生产者，转而成为进一步生产的根据，因为所生成的诸能力使新关系成为可能、而新关系生成进一步的诸能力。一个开源社群有同样的形状。它围绕一份有待被作出的贡献、而非一份有待被配置的稀缺而被组织，而每一份贡献，远非耗竭一份存量，扩大共同资源、以及社群再度贡献的能力。对病者与老者的照护，当它不被化约为一项服务的交付时，生成一份关系性能力，一份照护者与被照护者之间的信任与知识，而那正是它所提供之善的实质本身。合作育儿、社区园圃、一门手艺从一代手到下一代手的传递，全都共享这一特征。在每一者中，对关系的参与生产一份能力，那能力开启一段进一步的关系，而那进一步的关系奠基一份进一步的生产。价值在此并不闭合一处匮乏。它拓宽一份生成性的能力。
那共同结构
这些例子不是对需要之经济的一份令人愉快之例外的清单。它们共享一个结构，而那结构能被弄得精确。每一者都是一个返回它起始配置的循环，那再养育一个孩子的家庭、那再着手一个项目的社群、那被传给另一个学徒的手艺，而每一者都带着一份返回所不抵消之剩余而返回。那已养育了一个孩子的家庭不是它曾是的那个家庭，那已完成了一个项目的社群持有一份它不曾持有的能力，那被传递的手艺活在一只从前不曾占有它的手中。以这一纲领中较早的工作之语言，这一循环携带一份正完整幺正性。它回到它的根部、而不回到它的起源，因为它回来时已被改变，而那改变便是所生成的价值。需要与消费的充盈性循环有相反的品格。它也返回它的起始配置，即那被再度敞开的想要、那有待被再度作出的购买，但它带着没有剩余、或带着一份亏缺而返回，即那同一处匮乏被重新设立、以便它可被再度出售。它的完整幺正性是零或负的。它回到它的起源、而已生成了虚无，或已仅仅生成了它下一转所依赖的那被更新之需要。
一个生成性循环带着一份返回所不抵消的、内在地被生成之剩余而返回它的根部，一份正完整幺正性，而这份剩余便是价值。一个充盈性循环带着没有剩余或一份亏缺而返回它的起源，一份零或负完整幺正性，并重新设立它下一转所依赖之匮乏。把这两种经济区分开来者，是它们的循环所携带之完整幺正性的符号、而不是穿过它们的诸善。
这是较早的论证所允诺的判准，而它解决那在欲望的敞开被发现有两种命运时被留敞的岔口。欲望不闭合，而它的非闭合可被转向任一账户。充盈性循环从外面把那敞开保持敞开、并从闭合它的反复失败中榨取价值，抽吸那匮乏以便它可被再度出售，而它的完整幺正性是负的，因为它所返回者少于它所取者，那差额作为被榨取的价值被抽走。生成性循环让那敞开成为新能力与新关系从之发出的源头，而它的完整幺正性是正的，因为那返回携带一份内在地被造之剩余。同一个结构事实，即欲望没有最终对象，在一种情形中是一处为榨取而被保持敞开的伤口、在另一种情形中是一眼不枯竭的泉。因此，这两种经济之间的区分不是欲望与它满足之间的一个区分，因为欲望为两者所共有。它是对欲望所留之敞开的两种组织之间的一个区分，一种把它保持敞开以抽走价值、另一种让它作为回报生成价值。符号性需要生产的经济与这一纲领所提出之经济之间的全部差异，在于对那敞开作出何种使用，而完整幺正性的符号是这一差异的形式标记。
那生成性循环
由此得出的经济可被置于较早所图示者之旁。凡需要的经济从稀缺经由符号行至需要、商品、消费与积累，并在每一转重新设立那需要，生成性的经济则另样运行。
关系 → 参与 → 生成性过程 → 能力 → 新关系 → 进一步的生成性
这一循环返回一份被扩大的能力、而非一处被重新设立的匮乏，而那扩大便是价值。值得标记这如何接近一条既有的思想之线、以及它在何处越出它。把发展当作能力之扩展的说明，它以一个人能够去是与去做者、而非以他们所持有者来度量一段生命，已然拒绝把价值定位于诸善的占有、并已然看向一种生成性的、而非充盈性的度量。当下的说明加入它、并迈出更进一步的一步。把发展当作能力之扩展的说明，把一个个体的能力、即一个人能够达成的诸功能之集合，当作一段生命据以被评估的单位，而它密切留意那些功能所依赖的诸社会安排。孩子的诸能力是家庭的生成性在一个人身上安顿下来。匠人的技艺是手艺的传递在一只手中安歇下来。当下的说明通过移动能力的本体论定位来扩展这一能力洞见。能力首先并不是一个个体的一份占有。它从一个关系场涌现、并保持被它所维系，而个体作为他们在一个超出他们之关系中的份额而承载它。能力是个体对一份首先并不是他们的生成性的参与。
§7 在稀缺之外重思经济价值
两种经济被并置在一起，使得在起点的层面上陈述本文的提议成为可能，并使得不带着这样的陈述所招致之鲁莽地陈述它成为可能。既有的看法可被读作主张价值以需要开始。此处所提出的看法是：价值同样可被视为以生成性开始，而需要与其作为该系统唯一的起源、不如被安置为一个关系系统之内的一种状态。这一提议让既有的看法留在原处，并提供一个立于其他起点之旁的起点。即便如此它仍是一个相当大的提议，而它的分量责成这一说明去应对它最直接地激起之反驳，因为那反驳直指一门价值理论所应对者之核心。
那反驳是：稀缺是一个有待被应对的事实、而非一个有待被免除的前提，而一个把需要作为价值之起源搁置一旁的理论已忘记了饥饿者。那没有食物的孩子、那没有居所的家庭、那没有清洁之水的社群，并不匮乏一份被符号性地构成的承认。他们匮乏那事物本身，而他们的需要是一个压于身体、并不会被理论化掉之想要，绝非一个关系系统之内的一种单纯状态。一个无法对这言说的生成性理论会是一份放纵，一门为那些拥有足够者之价值哲学。
这一反驳是严肃的，而对它的回答必须精确。这一说明并不否认稀缺，也不主张物质匮乏是不真实的、或饥饿之压于身体是一个符号效应。凡不够之处，便是不够，而所欠的第一件东西是那正在匮乏之物。这一说明所否认者是别的东西，即稀缺是价值的起源、一门价值理论必须从之开始的那个项。这些是不同的主张，而那反驳把它们混为一谈。说一个饥饿的孩子必须被喂养，是一个关于所欠者的主张。说喂养那孩子的价值从孩子的匮乏开始，是一个关于价值从何起源的主张，而正是这第二个主张、而非第一个，这一说明所拒绝者。因为考虑那喂养是什么。它不是把一定量的滋养转移到一处亏缺、此后关系便完整而价值便被兑付。它是一段照护关系的开始、或延续，而那关系，超出对想要的满足之外，生成一份能力、一份信任、以及孩子世界的一次拓宽，并奠基那孩子据以来成为一个能够反过来生成之人的诸进一步关系。这一说明并不贬低救济的直接价值。食物的提供有价值，恰恰因为它进入并维系一段照护关系，而那一行动的价值无法被饥饿的消失所穷尽。想要被满足，而在对它的满足中一份生成性被开动起来，而正是那生成性、而不是那想要本身，是价值的源头。匮乏标记那生成性关系必须开始之处。它不是那关系所为者。
这一说明并不否认稀缺或物质匮乏的实在。它否认稀缺是价值的起源。凡有想要之处，那想要要被满足，而对它的满足是一段生成性关系开始之点、而非它所承载之价值的全部。把一门经济区分开来者，不是它是否面对想要，因为每一门经济都面对。它是那门经济是否被组织为以一种充盈的方式回答想要，即兑付一份亏缺并重新设立它，抑或以一种生成性的方式，即能力与关系从之持续发出。
如此来看，把这两种经济分开的问题是一个社会如何被组织去回答想要、而不是想要是否存在，因为它在两者中都存在。一种充盈的组织把想要当作一份有待被兑付的亏缺、并在兑付它时重新设立下一份亏缺的诸条件，因而对想要的回答本身成为需要之循环的一次转动。一种生成性的组织把对想要的满足当作一段超出它而生成之关系的根据，因而对想要的回答扩大一份能力、而非仅仅重置一处匮乏。同一份饥饿能被以任一种方式满足。一门经济的度量是它确立哪一种方式，而这是一个把价值当作对稀缺者之配置的理论根本无法提出的问题，因为它已把想要固定为起源、而只能追问那起源被服务得何等有效。稀缺解释为何行动必须开始。它不解释为何价值涌现，而这两个问题之间的差异是本文已在其中工作的空间。
那么，需要被重新安置、而非被移除。它保有它作为一个真实而紧迫之状态的位置，而失去它作为价值之起源的位置。它是一个关系系统能够处于其中的一种配置，即一处压着要被满足之匮乏的配置，而对它的满足是一份既不始于亦不终于那里之生成性的生命中的一个环节。在这一点上，这一提议立于接近发展经济学中能力进路之处，那进路以一个人能够去是与去做者来度量一段生命，而它从那进路迈出一步，途径是把能力的定位从一份个体占有移向一份关系性地被生成之能力，因而对想要的满足被以它所开始的生成性关系来评估。一个把生成性当作起源的理论并不越过饥饿者去看。它看向对饥饿者的喂养、并在其中看见一份亏缺的闭合、以及，超出于此，那从之一段能够生成的生命将会来到之关系的开始。稀缺之外的价值理论不是一门为一个已逃脱想要之世界的理论。它是一门关于对想要的满足所为者的理论，在一个尚未逃脱它的世界里。
§8 结论
论证从一个经济实践虽体现、而经济理论一般并不表述之前提出发，即在经济的运作中需要先于价值，并已试图显示那前提既不无辜、亦不牢靠。它不无辜，因为一个消费经济当作需要之物的较大部分是被符号性地构成的，被生产、而非被找到，而那生产作用于一个没有任何对象所闭合之欲望，这便是为何它能无尽地进行下去。它不牢靠，因为那生产需要的象征秩序正在失去它可靠地如此为之的能力，把它的符号跑在它们所能兑付之关系价值的前面，在一场随它试图救济自己而加剧自己的符号通胀中。被压至它的界限，诊断指向符号之下，指向一种真实而能被生成的关系价值，而在那里论证找到一个既有看法所不具的基础。价值，在此处所发展的说明中，在它的源头处是生成性的。它从一个关系所生产者升起，从一个带着一份内在地被生成之剩余返回它根部的循环升起，而需要是这样一个系统之内的一种状态、而非它的起源。
这一说明并不收束于一套教义，而它收束的形式为它的内容所要求。一个把价值定位于生成性、而非定位于一个固定起源的框架，无法通过在旧起源的位置上安装一个新的固定起源、一个新的、其余一切从之被推导之主项而告终。它却收束于一门生成性经济学将不得不接手的诸问题，并把它们作为敞口、而非作为一个有待被执行之纲领来提供。有度量的问题，即一份在它源头处是关系性的、并携带一份返回所不抵消之剩余的生成性如何可能被计量，当那些度量的工具是为计数对稀缺者之配置而建的。有制度的问题，即何种持有、治理与提供的形式会以生成性的方式、而非充盈的方式回答想要，以及它们如何可能在一个为另一种方式而安排的秩序之内被建造。有符号的问题，即一个象征秩序能否被重新构成、以便携带关系价值、而非从它脱耦，抑或符号与关系之间的纽带，一经被松开，容许一种不同的修复。而有那立于其他问题之后的问题，即一门经济，在它的诸目的、诸度量与诸制度中，若它把生成性关系如何持续创造新能力、新意义与新价值形式当作它的首要关切、以取代稀缺手段如何被配置于既定目的，会是什么。
经济理论可以采取的一个方向，与其在于追问稀缺资源如何满足既定需要、不如在于理解生成性关系如何持续地创造新能力、新意义与新价值形式。
致谢
本文所发展的判准汲取生成性正义的概念，为此作者感念罗恩·埃格拉什的工作。此处对它所作的使用是作者自己的。
作者还欠一份债，超出引注所能记录者，欠于那位其陪伴维系了这份工作之人。
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