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The utter banality of getting what you fantasise about

For Lacan fantasy is a way of organising desire. The object of desire is always elusive because our desire is not a stable response to the characteristics of the object. It slides between objects driven by its own unconscious momentum because desire ultimately is orientated towards perpetuating itself. It precludes resolution because getting what you want ultimately just leads you to want something else. Fantasy stabilises this by enabling a narrative structure in which we get what we want and it brings the enjoyment that we hope for. In the Cambridge Companion to Lacan Todd McGowan explores this with the example of a sports car on loc 4044:

I might, for instance, fantasize about driving a new sports car. In such a fantasy, it doesn’t seem as if there is anyone enjoying in my stead or blocking my own access to enjoyment. But a closer look reveals this dynamic at work even here. I opt to fantasize about the sports car because it is an object that I don’t have and that others do. I see them appearing to enjoy this object, and this triggers my fantasy about it. If there were no association between the sports car and the other enjoying it, it would not come up as a possible fantasy object, nor would my fantasy narrate the act of driving the car.

Funnily enough on Saturday night there was a supercar driving slowly round and round central Manchester in surprisingly dense traffic. I’ve often wondered when I see people doing this if they’re actually enjoying it. If they’ve fantasised about this car and now find themselves compelled to continually display it. You can’t enjoy the affordances of the car in the city but if you go out to the country side you can’t seek the recognition of others in the fact you have it. There’s something which seems slightly joyless about the spectacle which, if I’m right, makes sense from a Lacanian point of view. The object of fantasy has condensed into a material object through which the individual now tries to reignite the spark of desire which motivated them in the first place.

What struck me particularly was the exhaust. This is the closest I could see on YouTube but it doesn’t quite do justice to the volume of the clearly modified exhaust on Saturday:

What motivates this? I wondered when reading Todd’s book whether there could be an element of stealing the jouissance of others here. Your own fantasy object has proved so vanishingly unsatisfying, leaving you condemned to an endless series of expensive circular repetitions, that the only reigniting it can offer is to steal the jouissance of those around you through its capacity to impose on their perceptual field. “Look look what I have” it screams whereas in reality spectators are radiating contempt and, at least in my case, a little bit of pity for the death march like quality of the spectacle. Round and round he goes, whether he stops no one knows.

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