> 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?
Part of the aporia in the passage is that the gift, too, is problematic -- it's embodied labor-time, too, and therefore susceptible to all the ills of the commodity form. Adorno is talking about the destruction of the use-values of the gift by capitalist exchange-value, but he insists there's no going back to some primordial ur-communism or anything like that. Just because the ideology of free and equal exchange is currently a lie doesn't mean that the thing isn't worth fighting for, any more than the struggle universal human rights should be abandoned because Governments/corporations everywhere are repressive and do evil things. A society which didn't constantly screw over the majority of its citizens and plunder the earth would probably have a kind of community which we ourselves, caught in prehistory, can barely even begin to imagine.
-- Dennis