Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> This is a smart move: instead of throwing out the phallus completely and
> pretending that the objective laws of the marketplace of identity can be
> overturned with a few slogans (the micropolitical equivalent of the
> sectarian anti-capitalist who thinks that saying "capitalism sucks"
> over and over again equates to a genuine revolution), she emphasizes the
> objectivity of the thing amidst the utopian field of "lesbian exchange",
> i.e. the ideal of free and fair exchange, where no person's identity would
> be oppressed, canalized, neocolonized or usurped by any other. What's
> lacking here, though, is a more general notion of community, i.e. the
> problem of relating all this to gay liberation, African America struggles,
> feminism, etc. etc. etc. Might communities, do, experience something like
> free and equal exchange? They might, but they don't, because we exist in
> bureaucratic networks of power and domination called "corporations" which
> mostly prevent this from happening, and set each community at war with
> every other one.
or 'the preponderance of the object', as teddy adorno said. here's comay on adorno, and taking up a similar theme, though i think maybe unsettling the way that you have rendered community as the possibility of a 'free and equal exchange':
"Adorno once remarked that it is a symptom of class society (and in particular our own society, the society of the surplus which creates the very possibility of surplus 'theory') that the ability to give has been eroded. Gift-giving - what had been the paradigm of 'every undistorted relationship', becomes the promise of the conciliation of and with nature itself - becomes constricted into the contractual exchange between partners. What such a society cannot think (the logic of identity excludes it) is the possibility of an encounter that would upset the regulated equilibrium of accounts. For the gift would mark a point of incommmensurability which would challenge the ideology of education and reciprocity on which capitalism must depend. It would upset the homeostatic order of restitution and exchange, exposing the prevailing ideology of just exchange between equals as just the mask worn by the system to cover up the real inequities of the day"
from 'Gifts without presents: economics of 'experience' in battaille and heidegger', yale french studies, n78, 1990. pp 67-8.
a passage that for me at least sets off a whole series of troubseome questions, like: how then is community possible if we take as its aim a 'free and equal exchange'? how is it possible to do otherwise?
angela