Permitted and Prohibited Desires

Desire is both of and beyond the everyday. In an ad for running shoes, for example, the figure of a man jogging at dawn on the Serengeti Plain both evokes a fantasyof escape and invokes a disciplinary norm to stay fit. The bottom line for thead, of course, is to create a desire to consume, the promise being that with thepurchase of these shoes, the consumer can realize yet also transcend the daily exhortationto perform.To say this differently, there is something both real and...
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Desire is both of and beyond the everyday. In an ad for running shoes, for example, the figure of a man jogging at dawn on the Serengeti Plain both evokes a fantasyof escape and invokes a disciplinary norm to stay fit. The bottom line for thead, of course, is to create a desire to consume, the promise being that with thepurchase of these shoes, the consumer can realize yet also transcend the daily exhortationto perform.To say this differently, there is something both real and phantasmic about desire.Yet this notion seems contradictory. Isn't there a difference between the desireto be fit, for example, which is realizable, realistic, and, in these senses, realand the desire to escape routine everydayness, which, for most of us, is inescapablemost of the time? But is exercise real or phantasmic? Certainly noteveryone works out, and even those who make exercise a part of their reality maydo so in order to pursue a fantasy about themselves. And are escapes from dailyroutines phantasmic or real? An escape from the everyday is far more realizablefor some people than even fitness. But here too what is fantasy blends into (andbecomes indistinguishable from) the real: A vacation away from work may be ameans of ensuring a higher level of work performance when one returns.