The Hunger Artist
Notes on Sustenance, Desire and Happiness
Justin Panson
Freaks & Voyeurs
Near his death Franz Kafka wrote a little parable about a performer in a circus with a unique talent of starving himself in a cage, called the Hunger Artist. This apparently was a real thing back in the early twentieth century. Day after day crowds flocked to see the Hunger Artist, hanging on every detail of his excruciating condition, captivated by the spectacle of self-destruction. When people finally lost interest, the performer was crushed, denied the attention that drove his art. And so he descended to a state of metaphorical hunger where he was rendered even more real and naked than his wretched show persona.
In reading this story we pity the unfortunate freak, but we also reckon with ourselves as part of the circus audience that is just as freakish, being dependent on this wicked performative sacrifice. The hunger artist’s cruel fate was being forgotten—ours is greedy voyeurism. Nobody is spared. This is the genius of Kafka.
Self Denial in the Land of Plenty
Steve Jobs advised us to "Stay hungry, stay foolish," invoking a sort of new age aspirational hunger at the heart of innovation, creativity and business tenacity. In this usage “hunger” is a way to understand the human drive responsible for the so-called built world, the pyramids stacked up to please the gods, the larger manifest destiny of the species. Given this, what do we make of the idea of a diet? The voluntary denial of hardwired instinct? Is it a stoic counterpoint to all human momentum?
In these times of wealth and material excess, rationing seems like a contrary act. But people undertake diets and fasts with a near religious sense of honor and nobility, celebrating their own discipline in containing hunger and their progress toward the goalposts of self improvement. It is the hunger artist’s self-destructive shtick turned upside down.
Pleasure Cult of Shopping
In a world so far beyond subsistence, hunger now serves as a driver of consumer want and craving, in which the descendants of hunters and gatherers enact the same in an online hunting ground, and maybe still in the faux town square of the shopping mall. Whatever else we may be, we are consumers, a role central to modern identity.
In a hyper-consumerist society each new gadget, each sip of soda, each miracle elixir promises happiness. Thorstein Veblen advised that the act of shopping itself becomes a sport that feeds self worth and pride, an elaborate taste-signaling ritual and recreation, reinforcing attributes of wealth and strength. At consumerism’s core is hunger, the need and the want of things—to own, to have to possess. Fetish objects across a range of desires—luxury items, utility products, material that we believe will satisfy hunger, real, imagined or manufactured.
It gets complicated when you consider how material need intertwines and overlaps with sexual hunger. Biology and conquest are enabled through an elaborate system of material proxies and status signals.
Instigating and enabling hunger is the work of Advertising, the dark art of understanding and manipulating psychology to conjure a state of “hedonic consumption” in which your decisions are driven by pleasure more than utility. The ad guys can track you down and sell you anything, whether you need it or not.
But reality check: happiness isn’t tracking. The data indicates a disconnect between material conquests and corresponding happiness, at least according to social scientific findings from “the field.” In other words, buying shit no longer satisfies us. Despite the fantasy world of commercial advertising, consumers exist in an increasingly joyless transactional economy that provides less satisfaction, leaving buyers and users with cravings that cannot be satisfied. Faith, love, friendship and family be damned!
The Best Sauce
Hunger is the best sauce, so the idiom goes. The most literal expression of consumer hunger is found in the trendy realms of the foodie, concerned with so many culinary enthusiasms and conceits: The cook books, cultural explorations, celebrity chefs, bloggers, recipe collectors—from hot dogs to caviar and everything in between. The crack cocaine of this realm are those short YouTube recipe videos tempting us to pause from the endless scroll and enjoy irresistibly succinct procedurals that build a self-contained logic of sequence right before our eyes.
In this theater, Ina Garten and Martha Stewart are WASP high priestesses. These preppy marms have spawned imitators professional and amateur alike, all the way down to the comic roughnecks Guy Fuieri and Maddy Matheson.
Food performers reach for our attention with fancified expressions of craft, kitchen innovation, and my favorite: the homespun narratives that lead us back to ancient foodways. Who can’t relate to the domestic comfort and generational familiarity of grandmothers? While heritage may be interesting, the other question is why we can’t look away from Fiuri stuffing all that hearty cheesy faire into his pie hole? The line from some Mike Meyers movie echos back to me, where an overwrought gourmand addresses his food directly: Get in my belly!
The Snack at the End of the Rainbow
The idea of hunger underpins much of modern life—as needy consumerism, as pumped up aspiration, and as heroic self-denial. Under the load of so much contrary meaning the concept itself begins to strain. In the new millennium we “Westerners” are ballooned in girth and ego, living in an elaborate landscape of factories and supply chains. We have evolved such a long, long way from apeman subsistence, all the way to this fortunate historical circumstance where we busy ourselves inventing strategies for both satisfying and denying hunger. We aren’t the Kalahari Bushmen anymore, and we aren’t in Kansas anymore. And we have realized The Great and Powerful Oz is just a carnie showman with a super smooth rap.
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
— Sylvia Plath
Freaks & Voyeurs
Near his death Franz Kafka wrote a little parable about a performer in a circus with a unique talent of starving himself in a cage, called the Hunger Artist. This apparently was a real thing back in the early twentieth century. Day after day crowds flocked to see the Hunger Artist, hanging on every detail of his excruciating condition, captivated by the spectacle of self-destruction. When people finally lost interest, the performer was crushed, denied the attention that drove his art. And so he descended to a state of metaphorical hunger where he was rendered even more real and naked than his wretched show persona.
In reading this story we pity the unfortunate freak, but we also reckon with ourselves as part of the circus audience that is just as freakish, being dependent on this wicked performative sacrifice. The hunger artist’s cruel fate was being forgotten—ours is greedy voyeurism. Nobody is spared. This is the genius of Kafka.
Self Denial in the Land of Plenty
Steve Jobs advised us to "Stay hungry, stay foolish," invoking a sort of new age aspirational hunger at the heart of innovation, creativity and business tenacity. In this usage “hunger” is a way to understand the human drive responsible for the so-called built world, the pyramids stacked up to please the gods, the larger manifest destiny of the species. Given this, what do we make of the idea of a diet? The voluntary denial of hardwired instinct? Is it a stoic counterpoint to all human momentum?
In these times of wealth and material excess, rationing seems like a contrary act. But people undertake diets and fasts with a near religious sense of honor and nobility, celebrating their own discipline in containing hunger and their progress toward the goalposts of self improvement. It is the hunger artist’s self-destructive shtick turned upside down.
Pleasure Cult of Shopping
In a world so far beyond subsistence, hunger now serves as a driver of consumer want and craving, in which the descendants of hunters and gatherers enact the same in an online hunting ground, and maybe still in the faux town square of the shopping mall. Whatever else we may be, we are consumers, a role central to modern identity.
In a hyper-consumerist society each new gadget, each sip of soda, each miracle elixir promises happiness. Thorstein Veblen advised that the act of shopping itself becomes a sport that feeds self worth and pride, an elaborate taste-signaling ritual and recreation, reinforcing attributes of wealth and strength. At consumerism’s core is hunger, the need and the want of things—to own, to have to possess. Fetish objects across a range of desires—luxury items, utility products, material that we believe will satisfy hunger, real, imagined or manufactured.
It gets complicated when you consider how material need intertwines and overlaps with sexual hunger. Biology and conquest are enabled through an elaborate system of material proxies and status signals.
Instigating and enabling hunger is the work of Advertising, the dark art of understanding and manipulating psychology to conjure a state of “hedonic consumption” in which your decisions are driven by pleasure more than utility. The ad guys can track you down and sell you anything, whether you need it or not.
But reality check: happiness isn’t tracking. The data indicates a disconnect between material conquests and corresponding happiness, at least according to social scientific findings from “the field.” In other words, buying shit no longer satisfies us. Despite the fantasy world of commercial advertising, consumers exist in an increasingly joyless transactional economy that provides less satisfaction, leaving buyers and users with cravings that cannot be satisfied. Faith, love, friendship and family be damned!
The Best Sauce
Hunger is the best sauce, so the idiom goes. The most literal expression of consumer hunger is found in the trendy realms of the foodie, concerned with so many culinary enthusiasms and conceits: The cook books, cultural explorations, celebrity chefs, bloggers, recipe collectors—from hot dogs to caviar and everything in between. The crack cocaine of this realm are those short YouTube recipe videos tempting us to pause from the endless scroll and enjoy irresistibly succinct procedurals that build a self-contained logic of sequence right before our eyes.
In this theater, Ina Garten and Martha Stewart are WASP high priestesses. These preppy marms have spawned imitators professional and amateur alike, all the way down to the comic roughnecks Guy Fuieri and Maddy Matheson.
Food performers reach for our attention with fancified expressions of craft, kitchen innovation, and my favorite: the homespun narratives that lead us back to ancient foodways. Who can’t relate to the domestic comfort and generational familiarity of grandmothers? While heritage may be interesting, the other question is why we can’t look away from Fiuri stuffing all that hearty cheesy faire into his pie hole? The line from some Mike Meyers movie echos back to me, where an overwrought gourmand addresses his food directly: Get in my belly!
The Snack at the End of the Rainbow
The idea of hunger underpins much of modern life—as needy consumerism, as pumped up aspiration, and as heroic self-denial. Under the load of so much contrary meaning the concept itself begins to strain. In the new millennium we “Westerners” are ballooned in girth and ego, living in an elaborate landscape of factories and supply chains. We have evolved such a long, long way from apeman subsistence, all the way to this fortunate historical circumstance where we busy ourselves inventing strategies for both satisfying and denying hunger. We aren’t the Kalahari Bushmen anymore, and we aren’t in Kansas anymore. And we have realized The Great and Powerful Oz is just a carnie showman with a super smooth rap.
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
— Sylvia Plath
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