Scolarian Bikes recently reached out to me and asked if I wanted to give one of their tracklocross framesets a shot, and to be honest, I needed a bit of a kick to get myself into gear, so I said yes. It then made me start thinking about why I needed something new to spark me into action.
As always, I thought about Slavoj Žižek and what he would say.
So, I made a video.
Here is the script, possibly not word-for-word.
Žižek’s reflections on jouissance often circle around the paradox of enjoyment: the way we pursue an activity not for its straightforward pleasure, but for the friction, the difficulty, even the pain that becomes inseparable from desire. In this sense, the hobbyist traclocrosser exemplifies the structure of jouissance. To grind through mud on a brakeless fixed gear, to feel the body’s limits exposed in every slip and climb, is not simply about leisure or sport; it is a confrontation with enjoyment in its most excessive, even absurd form. The rider laughs at the impossibility of the endeavour and yet continues, compelled by the strange surplus that arises from suffering turned into play.
The arrival of a new bike complicates this dynamic. In consumer terms, it promises a renewal of the hobby: fresh geometry, lighter tubing, pristine bearings. Yet for Žižek, the new bike is less an object of pure use than a fetish, something onto which desire is displaced, a vessel for jouissance that will inevitably disappoint once the mud cakes the chain and the scratches appear on the paint. And still, the ritual repeats: the rider projects their fantasies of mastery and freedom onto the machine, only to discover that the real pleasure lies not in the smooth ideal of ownership but in the gritty, awkward practice of tracklocross itself. The new bike is thus both a lure and a reminder: the true ‘hobby’ is not in having, but in riding, and in the stubborn embrace of enjoyment where reason would say stop.
I need more
Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical project revolves, in part, around the structure of enjoyment (jouissance), not simply pleasure, but a kind of enjoyment that overshoots its goal, that involves friction, absurdity, even suffering. For Žižek, desire is never satisfied in the way we believe it might be; it teases us, pushes us into gaps, and sometimes locates its greatest output in what we might think of as failure.
Enter the tracklocrosser: someone drawn to a practice that is not clean, not easy, not predictable. Tracklocross, for all its fun, is demanding: muddy terrain, lack of coasting, one gear, flat tires, scratched rims, crashes. It is a discipline built around constraint, around friction. This is precisely where jouissance lives: in the gap between what one expects (smooth rides, triumphs, flawless performance) and the fact of the ride, including the mud, the slipping chain, the blood-on-knees moments. The very elements that “spoil” the picturesque ride are what make the ride real, intense, alive.
So when one thinks of buying a new bike, especially for tracklocross, the object is never just transportation. It becomes a fetish: a locus onto which hopes, identity, fantasies, and this impossible desire are projected. The new frame, the fresh components, the pristine paint: all carry the promise of mastery, control, and purity. Yet as soon as that bike hits the trail, that promise is subject to betrayal, by mud, by crashes, by mechanical failure. And yet that betrayal is precisely part of the charm. In Žižekian terms, the new bike both embodies the fantasy and anchors the Real: the moment of disillusionment, the moment when the object fails, yet one continues wanting more.
Hobby, Identity, and the Ethics of Limitation
Hobbies are often thought of as ways to pass time, to relax, to express oneself. But when we view them through a more critical lens, one rooted in psychoanalytic theory, hobbies are bound up with identity, with the symbolic field, with the demand that we be a certain kind of subject. The tracklocrosser, for example, doesn’t just want to ride; they want to be someone who can endure grit, who laughs in the face of tough climbs, who takes pride in scuffed paint and crooked spokes.
Limitation is central here. In many of Žižek’s analyses, constraint is not merely something imposed from outside, but something that structures subjectivity; something through which desire comes alive. A fixed gear drivetrain disallows coasting. A brakeless setup demands continuous attention. A rough trail resists control. These constraints, mechanical, environmental, and physical, force the rider into an engagement that is both demanding and rewarding. When obstacles appear, one learns new capacities: balance, improvisation, resilience. No less important, one learns to accept imperfection.
And here the new bike is both utopia and test. It stands as the pure promise: perfect geometry, flawless welds, light yet strong, responsive, sexy. Yet it is also installed into a world that ensures it will be scratched, bent, and soiled. The joy comes in carrying that promise into the chaos and seeing what happens. In some ways, the hobby becomes an ethics of acceptance: accepting that the ideal will degrade; that one will fail; but also that that failure is part of what makes the hobby matter.
Friction, Speed, Slow Moments
Tracklocross is uniquely placed to reveal the tension between speed and slowness, between control and chaos. Tracklocross is about riding on a patchwork of terrain, unpredictable surfaces, transitions, and interruptions. One minute fast, straight; the next minute a steep bank, mud, roots, debris.
That variability means riding tracklocross is not just about physical fitness or gear. It’s about adaptability, about negotiating unexpected obstacles, about embracing moments of disruption. The rider is always slightly thrown off, always recovering, always adjusting. In those moments, one experiences time differently: rhythm punctured, plans overturned. Speed sometimes becomes less about outright velocity and more about momentum: keeping something going even when everything resists.
Here again jouissance rears its head: it is in the moment of loss or near-loss (a chain drop, a near crash, a locked wheel) that the texture of enjoyment thickens. Because these are risky, dangerous even. They force the rider to let go of control. The new bike, in this terrain, isn’t just a tool; it becomes a collaborator, adversary, and a companion. It demands respect, negotiation; it disappoints; it surprises.
New Bike Day
The new bike is never just a bike. It is a promise with welds, a narrative in lacquer, a small shrine to a future self who will, so we swear, climb more cleanly, corner more deftly, and breathe in rhythm with the earth rather than in panicked gasps beside it. Tracklocross, with its devotion to constraint (fixed gear, often brakeless, always a little perverse), renders this promise unusually stark. Because nothing about the discipline is “sensible”, the new machine cannot be justified solely in terms of function: the surplus beyond function is not an optional garnish, it is the main course.
Žižek would call this surplus the domain of jouissance, the “too much” that accompanies every attempt to align means and ends. Even if the frame truly is lighter and stiffer, even if the tyres roll easily, there remains something else, an excess that refuses to be tabulated in watts or seconds. That “something else” is why the rider unboxes with a reverence strangers reserve for weddings and rare books, why torque specs are read aloud like liturgy, and why, when the first scratch lands, the rider feels both wounded and oddly baptised. The wound proves the thing has entered life.
The inaugural lap borders on ceremonial. You pick a loop you know well, not to test speed but to test difference: the bike’s voice in familiar sentences. You notice how the front end tucks into a low-speed hairpin or how the rear skips over moist pine needles. On a short climb, the gear choice feels slightly other: a fraction taller than expected, demanding a different rhythm, teaching new timing in the hips.
Every sound is a text. A faint tick from the bottom bracket area; is it pedal washer or chainring bolt? Creaks in a new frame are not yet annoyances; they are messages. The body attends. How the tyres fold when you lean into a camber and how they rebound after the root compresses the casing; whether the front end begs for the fork to have a touch more trail. This observational richness is itself jouissance, a surplus of meaning that exceeds the functional need to “check if it works”.
Tracklocross further heightens first-ride solemnity because its trails compress variety: grass-to-gravel-to-sand-in-ten-seconds, turns that require small hop-skips, awkward off-cambers. The bike is tested not in a single virtue (speed, say) but in a bouquet of minor vices: how forgiving is it when your line is optimistic; how quickly does it return to tractable after a rear-wheel slide; whether the bottom bracket height encourages or punishes pedalling through rougher patches.
In the end, the story of Žižek, jouissance, hobbies, tracklocross, and a new bike is a story of tension: between ideal and real; between owning and doing; between the fantasy of mastery and the reality of struggle. The new bike embodies that tension: it is both a dream and a burden, both a promise and a site of disappointment. But it is precisely because it holds both that it matters.
Tracklocross reveals what hobbies can show us about ourselves: that enjoyment is not simply about comfort or perfection, but about engagement with resistance, with surfaces that push back. And the new bike is the agent of possibility: it carries us toward moments of awe, of speed, of flow; it also forces us to confront our limits, our frustrations, our bodily and mechanical failure. Between those poles is where jouissance lives.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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