Haunting Desire
A Lacanian Reflection on the Twisted Life
There’s a quote from a famous author, Paulo Coelho, which goes,
“If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they still want more”.
Many of us are already familiar with human nature that is never satisfied. Yet, many of us didn’t fully understand what it takes to be satisfied. We are constantly thriving and trying to find our answer to the unrelenting desire to escape the ordinary boring life. If you think this article will shed light on your life or give you a robust reason to continue pursuing your desire, then you’re hugely mistaken. This isn’t a self-help article that will guide you to achieve satisfaction in life or give you some life-affirming reflections.
It’s been months since I moved to the capital city. There’s a big false assumption that I made. I thought moving to a bigger town and having a job there would be a remedy for my unrelenting desire to escape my ordinary boring life, but I was mistaken. Don’t get me wrong; securing a job amidst this turbulent time was indeed a blessing that I should not take for granted. However, the ancient quote about humankind’s nature, which is always didn’t satisfied, is only scratching the iceberg’s tip of human nature complexity. At this point, many self-assuring quotes as a form of positive psychology practice might not mean anything.
It has something to do with subjectivity. The formation of our subjectivity reflects the socio-cultural process that constitutes us as a subject. A Subject is not born but is transformed into one from a concrete being by his immersion into the culture. Subjectivity is precisely our being’s condition, which enables us to recognize ourselves as subjects or persons. Subjectivity is something in us that we understand the world around us. Thus, what happens between subjectivity and desire?
According to the world-famous psychoanalysts, Lacan and Freud, desire is the central spot in constructing one’s subjectivity. This correlates with our existence as a subject — you are a subject who desires things. Still, tragically, you cannot satisfy yourself by your agency alone. This also means that any personal fulfillment, affection, social status, etc. are not fulfilled on your own. The objects of desire are always pulling us out into the world. Just like a carrot tied to a stick upon us, we are driven by the hunger for satisfaction, and we keep doing things without actually averting our eyes to stop and thinking thoroughly.
The understanding of thyself is dictated by the object of desire, whether it is a relationship goal, a job promotion, fame and status, political and economic conditions, or the accumulation of all those things. It made us believe that if we do not acquire those things, we never are ourselves entirely. We took an outward projection to see ourselves. Therefore, the desire itself is already an inseperateable part of us; you’re not you without all of your desires. However, it never has a fixed form; it mutates, transforms, and mimics everything we imagined while we clashed with the world outside until it left a desire-shaped hole within us.
We can’t be true to ourselves because some parts of us are absent elsewhere. Therefore we encounter a tragic moment for ourselves of the elusive and looming pressure from our societal apparatus, which always dictates us to be true to ourselves by using emancipatory jargon, like; “Be yourself,” “Stay true to yourself,” and “Do what you wanna do,” Etc. In our advanced capitalist qua visual-based society, the pressure gains its new latitude. We see many personal enjoyment projections, personal branding culture, or reification symptoms dominating our society, especially in social media. The carrot is getting bigger and varied. It’s a grand exhibition for the object of desire.
The Unrelenting Spectacles
The function of many cultural apparatus of an advanced capitalist qua visual-based society, like the so-called influencer culture with obsessive personal branding tendency on social media, is to construct the imaginary (object of desire) and make it available for us to purchase/consume. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation and become a building block for constructing our ideal self, and eventually, our reality.
While we consume all the imaginary experiences, we perceive ourselves through an imaginary crowd’s lens. We fantasize about ourselves as objects of desire. We created a fiction of ourselves through ‘the gaze’ of the others that’s not even real. Nevertheless, this is what made us keep moving forward. It’s an inevitable irony yet an important thing that gives us meaning in what we do. We see ourselves as an object under our own imagination and notion of the ‘ideal self.’ Still, the truth is we never become an object because an object doesn’t desire things.
The human interaction within the image-based society context is already transformed into some kind of spectacle with imaginary spectators. Like a spectacle/show and ultimately a form of leisure, the interaction itself is already formulaic and non-authentic. With social media presence in this context, many abstract things like social acceptance and others are quantified through likes, followers, and engagement rates.
The spectacles cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by the technology in the digital mediascape. It is a worldview that has been materialized — A view of a world that has become objective. There’s a pretense of actual reality, disguised as an omnipresent affirmation of the status quo of the production and consumption cycle of image representation.
I admit it’s not easy to reflect on our very own existence in a visual-based society.
However, some things bothered me — the emergence of pseudo-positivity, personal branding, and grinding culture amidst this hard time, made by key opinion leaders. There are countless contents on social media that show how happy they are and how they managed to “make it.” It really influences other people to do the same. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a bad thing to do. But, what bothers me is that the exhibition of happiness and success has become an unspoken obligation. It’s implied that no one has an excuse not to be happy or not achieve success during this crisis time.
This spectacle doesn’t want to know that anyone else is not having a great time as they do. As Guy Debord explains:
“What is good appears, the passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearness, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.”
Ultimately, happiness and success are required to influence and being ugly, tired, poor, etc. becomes our own problem.
Subjectivity forms from the internalization of all those things. We caught on the unreconcilable paradox. The critical point is that this form (ideal self) situates the ego’s agency before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible to the individual.
Your Life as a Mirror / See me!
Has our culture become so focused on the worship of image, prestige, and reputation that we have forgotten about modesty? Is giving the perception of perfection more critical than the truth, the truth that we are all imperfect humans living in an imperfect world? Apparently, it is.
How can we define our identity while we are so accustomed to seeing ourselves in an outwardly projected way? The fictional direction of how we perceive our existence might be the source of our anxiety and subsequently dragging our feet into an identity crisis.
The fact is, a predicate that we pinned on our identities has an obscure and vague limit on when we are no longer ourselves in the process of addition or reduction of some elements to our identity’s totality. The entirety of our identity is not only the accumulation of all our identity elements. A new ‘nature’ also emerges from the accumulation, and it became the predicate of our symbolic identity. If ‘desire’ is the central element that makes us, then the accumulation of all images that we desire will not necessarily form a stable identity to signify ourselves.
As you become accustomed to attaching yourself to all images in this visual-based society, you've already failed to make yourself a complete unity with a stable identity. Furthermore, the personal branding culture within the visual-based society made us misrecognize ourselves as an object.
The truth is every one of us, including those who are working so hard to build their own ‘personal brand,’ is an anxious subject, trying so hard to be themselves. There’s a belief with the emergence of social media that all of us need to be seen as complete unities alongside other objects to signify our existence, which again, we aren’t. The desire to be seen is the desire to be ‘complete’ so we can signify ourselves (because we became an object in others’ eyes). In other words, we are tangled in the chain of validation.
The most tragic part of our lives is the logic that unconsciously submitted to the contemporary social acceptance notion within the visual-based society. Our desire is what makes us incomplete, yet we desire the ‘desire’ of others (which also makes them incomplete).
So, what we want from other people is a missing ‘substance,’ a negation, and an absence within the others to fill our absence. This will never solve the fundamental problem within us, and it’s hard to be resolved.
The image for each of us (which is constructed through the ‘gaze’) is now the mirror of a mirror. Everyone has their own media techs to try and ‘complete’ themselves like the object they desire. It’s a never-ending loop caused by the lack in the center of the form of our subjectivity.
