ABSTRACT
The dialectic of art as a substitute for radically transforming praxis, of aesthetic fantasy as substitute for the body's protean transaction with the real world, may also be perceived in the exploitation of illusion embodied in commodities, a phenomenon analyzed by W. F. Haug in his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics. Causality inheres in the political-symbolic economy of liberal exchange. Predicated on the uneven but combined development of political, economic, and ideological spheres of society, inequality engenders forms of resistance to the power of the dominant social bloc and its ideology of plural identities. As Hazel Carby puts it, the politics of multicultural difference can effectively neutralize the response of a racialized subject, thus repressing criticism of a social order structured in dominance by race. The politics of difference is what underwrites ghettoization and apartheid in the pluralist United States. A spurious identity, "Filipino American," is exhibited as mere form, without real substance.
