An updated adage for the post-political age: Ask not what your commodity can do for you, but what you can do for your commodity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkEw1rsBUak

In this car, the commodity-consumer relationship has entirely inverted. It is no longer the commodity that provides for me; rather, the commodity-object requires that I provide for it. Of course, the tit-for-tat contractuality of bourgeois social relations remains in tact (you please the car, and it will please you), but the point stands: the onus lies, fundamentally, with the consumer to "make the first move," as it were. Will I ever be able to take it to enough high-end stores and dinner parties to please it? Or, maybe it's sheer lust. Maybe all I have to do is perform well -- but which combination of gas-peddle manipulations would comprise good performance? Yet it's precisely this tension that sells the product. Here, we have the fetishistic gap between flesh-and-blood materiality and symbolic overcoding taken to new, absurd extremes": Who knows just how the car might please you?

The cyborgian aspects of this ad seem germane to various course themes. It's notable, to begin with, that Cadillac decided to gender the prototypic consumer-subject of this car feminine rather than masculine, since -- assuming heteronormative standards of advertising (more than a safe assumption, I think, given the source) -- this implicitly genders the car masculine. Although this gender scheme might feel intuitively felicitious (after all, aren't cars usually depicted as hyper-maculine power incarnate?), it actually runs contrary to the majority of such advertisements, which, insofar as they represent a sexualized bond between car and driver, tend to relegate the machine to a feminine position in which material passivity is coupled with libidinal activity -- a position of docile desire, the embodied occupant of which is mechanized and metalized. I would hardly be the first to suggest that this epitomizes male fantasy -- not so much pure sexual desire, but the more important, meta-level desire to surmount feminine desire, that impossible object-thing par excellence. On this reading, figures like Molly from Neuromancer literalize male fantasy: a cyborgified female subject whose desire has become -- like all machines -- codifiable and traversable.

So, what does it mean to invert the gender matrix, to have the female subject be the one in control, attemping to surmount the mystery of masculinized desire? Perhaps it relates to what Zizek calls "interpassivity" -- the inverse of interactivity (in which I get enjoyment from somebody else pursuing an activity in my place [e.g., when James Bond takes out the bad guy and gets the girl]). In an interpassive dynamic, I get enjoyment from someone else being passive in my place, the most immediately relevant example of which is probably canned laughter on sitcoms, which effectively make it unnecessary for me to even laugh at the "humorous" show I'm watching -- there's already somebody laughing at it for me. Could we read an interpassive dynamic into the Cadillac scenario as well? What a relief: I
(the male viewer-subject) don't have to enjoy being serviced, since the car effectively fills that symbolic burden for me. And furthermore, I don't have to come to terms with the trauma of masochistic fantasy -- I can keep performing masculinity in the same way, business-as-usual, never having to question the reproduction of patriarchal conditions...