Mulling over what you wrote… it strikes me that it may not be difficult to acknowledge objectification/commodification ( each of those terms signaling a different political orientation).

The painful part is ‘piercing the veil’… and I use that expression with the full awareness of its connotations which can be read either as sexist or Marxist or both or neither — to make the point that revealing the social – the material – that the object/commodity obscures is perhaps necessarily a painful and confusing experience. It threatens the cherished selfhood.

The contentious question is/was whether the choices we make of the tools, concepts, words to reveal to ourselves and others what is hidden necessarily and directly and only reflect our various social markings ?

If that is indeed the case, then there is really no cause for optimism right ? But if we grant that this may not be the case, then we can muddle along together in some spirit of hopefulness and togetherness whatever that ‘we’ may mean.

“And of course the production, and thereby silencing, of others on whose behalf then the upper-class/caste intellectual speaks is something we have to always be watchful about.”

The only web archive of Adrienne Rich’s Notes Towards a Politics of Location is here
http://www.medmedia.org/review/numero2/en/art3.htm

Reading it on the web – as a continuous essay is a terrible experience – the original, first delivered as a speech is actually composed of several bits of text, connecting with each other quite like so many pieces of a jig saw puzzle.

But it is still something – when the book is not at hand.
Anant