The images of the Titanic fascinate and confound viewers. The manor-like interior, paneled oak and ornate tiles, the lush glass of the Turkish baths, the long, sunlit promenade which never saw a day of rain in the fleeting lifespan of the ship… Countless projects are underway and have been underway to recreate this splendor, in whole or in part, and for good reason. The Titanic is presented to the consumer like a Faberge egg, a delicate capsule of infinite depth of beauty, which no amount of demystification could ever completely remove. This effect is granted to the ship through the very destruction of this beauty. in the same fashion that the Faberge eggs which hold the most fascinated attention are those thought lost, the very beauty of the image is its removal. Being withdrawn is the ultimate seduction, forever drawing the seduced on a predatory hunt through the forest for that which enticed them, a hunt pleasurably prolonged by the very unreachability of the thing desired.
Desire work as a machine, as shown plainly in this example. When the seducing-object is forever withdrawing itself, then the seduction lasts forever. There is no moment of grasping which transmutes the seducing-object into an object of the real, the object instead remains forever possessed with its mystical powers, pulling in on an endless motion, forever seducing, forever producing-desire. It’s this production of endless motion which is ultimately what the possessive sexuality wants, in practice. While in truth, it desires what it desires, in practice, what it desires is endless withholding, to be dragged along an unending quest. Countless men fall victim to this very impulse, their wives becoming “boring” as they become known, becoming entranced by the new one just out of reach, sent on the hunt for it…
The Titanic could never match the beauty it achieves for us today if it hadn’t sunk, and in this fashion, the fact of its sinking is the event of fascination. The much-lauded chick flick Titanic by James Cameron takes great care to show this in all its depravity and detail, water rushing through these same fetishized interiors, glass bursting, doors breaking open, first class passengers sinking beneath the waves, the grand staircase taking on water from below, the lights shutting off one final time. The ultimate possession, the ultimate entrapment into desire is this. The Titanic, the seducing-object becomes-abyss in the ultimate way, with the water rushing over every last bit of its being, to fully realize its potential within its liquid body. It’s no wonder then, that the male fetish for their navies has been transmuted through anime culture into erotic art, with Kancolle fandom taking this drama to an extremely literal extent, their ships turning “abyssal” in their most depraved fantasies of ultimate sexuality.
But why require the externalization present in the first place? The second fantasy is of course the ultimate fulfillment of the promises of seduction, but why externalize it onto the other? Why need the ocean to swallow the desired in the first place? The male fantasy so often includes the female, and for that we have to examine the function for the male of precluding himself from ownership. The primitive course of his desire is to be the ocean himself, so why externalize it? By externalizing it, he brings the object into eternal seduction but it’s a rare man with the intelligence to recognize this as being his truly ideal form of eroticism. Rather, the mechanic at work here is an externalization by the man of his own phallus.
The civilized male is constructed as an incomplete woman. Being possessed of an inherently primitive nature, but forced to civilize himself into the feminine ways of the superstructure into which he’s ingratiated. From this, his self-conception is one which relies on his own preclusion of himself from the phallus, to externalize the phallus onto another. The man will then either begin to take on drag-like costumes in order to prove his own virility, pomping himself into various roles which offer him a chance to perform phallus-hood, or he’ll begin to fetishize the process of externalization of his own phallus, which then creates the need to construct the ocean in the first place. It’s here that the civilized man finds his ultimate fulfillment of his entire system of desiring-machines, where the seducing-object is de-facto captured in his eternal chasing of it and his Self is retained as solid by the externalization of his own desire.
This externalization can be seen taking place in countless male and female fantasies. The woman as well, in order to preserve the stability and integrity of the men she desires, must externalize phallushood as well, onto the same others that men do. This is the fundamental sexual process behind the construction of the “primitive” or “natural” - the externalization of the phallus as an extension of greater externalization of fundamental but uncivilized processes, in other words, sublimating the base into the other who has not been uptaken into the structures of the society.
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