WEDGE COLLECTIVE replies. WITH BRISK resort to the latest fashionable journalistic catchword, Geoffrey Sheridan alleged that Wedge has not so far considered explicitly the relationship and interface between culture and politics.
It seems he OCCI reading the same magazine as the one we've been producing.
We don't intend to reply to this by pointing out that all issues contam discussions (although they do) because to reply this way would merely hide the misconceptions in the original remark.
The point is that Wedge does not contain discussions of this kind, this is what the magazine is explicitly about all the time.
But why can't Geoff that? His review was headed *Does Wedge know where to draw the line?' His blindness about Wedge's politics stems from the lines which he himself lines around constitutes culture, politics.
But our answer to rhetorical question is emphatically, Yes, lines must be drawn in different places from where they are habitually drawn.
We are not alone in believing this. People involved studying the political economy of culture have come to the same conclusion.
They have begun to engage in a debate against the defenders dominant bourgeois ideology who curiSUCH ously GraW lines culture and politics in roughly the same places as Geoff does.
Unfortunately, as in so many other areas of development of the sional journalists "of revolutionary press are becoming increasingly misinformed see (or should UnC say They sorely need to take a busperson's holiday form themselves developments.
We don't expect Geoff to agree this, dismisses Kevin his piece on une lent press so dismally.
Kevin's analysis is concerned with the problems of producing a revolutionary newspaper in a situation bluntly, professional journalists tend to have a counter productive effect.
Geoff says the distorted by ence for in which does not correspond to that of either of the newspapers ne exames But that's like saying "You don't agree with us, so we don't want to talk to you' forms of Similarly Geoff ignores all the between problems about political practice other articles such as Martin Thom's left TOIL language and the demonstraprofes the tion piece.
CONFUSED
disinHe simply confused conclusion, and in- that of these productions with radical content cannot succeed if they use a conventional since he form of presentation'. McDonnell's He then adds: "This highly contentious view appears to be unanimously collective to put reading this.
article is Kevin's 'preferbourgeois forms political project wonder practice approves of totally question of why substantive culturalnewspaper other possible anti-fascist comes to saying 'cultural "bourgeois"
relationships they've been classically by the 1 fined.
and Wedge effectively extends it to political activity'. Our minds boggled on It appears to suggest that Geoff thinks political activity academic, (leaving aside the question of "cultural production') is alright For if it has a radical content but if Geoff advocating this, or admitting that this is the kind of political forms, Socialist Challenge Kevin McDonnell's article of this process. raises but doesn't develop the produce newspaper at all; that is, why a in preference to forms of disseminating information and Wedge has constantly con- entry cerned itself with the gamut of all such forms. Obviously in only three issues we haven't tried to analyse them all, but it cannot have escaped anyone's attention that we totally reject LOTS any limiting definition of what constitutes the cultural field.
So of course we haven't spent much time explicitly addressing politics and cultural fields between as desuch is failing, but that it is in the process of changing course. It suke wnen reudansm began I don't know what will come after the family. My next film From "That Cold Day in the Wedding', your films have been centrally about portrayal of exclude particularly in "Images' and "Three Women'.
But most of the time your pletely alienated and entirely accept the American way of America is the women's movement and the reactionary treat women differently from men in my I tend to be more Perhaps this is because I was brought up in an all-woman household. I probably learned as I was growing up about women: about manoeuvring in a world of men are open. ve a lot of respect t omen. I donated $2m fro the profits from this film to the Amendment campaign as I find it ridiculous are considered Women It's in women's nature to be more "underground'. Women can't be the menace of the characters? they don't have the strength. To become powerful they have to adopt This isn't to say we don't believe this somewhat narrower area of investigation ic be important. But nowadays, to isolate it in any way would be in the pernicious sense of the word.
example, are many concerned with the way the traditional domains of 'Culture' have been swallowed up by an extension, and by new of industrialisation in the fields of cultural production, and with the consequences The break-up of traditional bourgeois definitions of culture had begun even before Marx Wal and Engels were dead, though they were hardly aware of it.
Now the process has become that commanding, with the massive of electronics-based transnational companies into all fields of culture, information, entertainment and education on all levels.
Since the leading corpora- IStS.
this SCCLUE now constitute the fastest growing FROM Photography and Art — Art as Photography at the ICA. Asexhibitor Didier Bay observes: 'Tam both a long user of photo and text in autodidacts ways altogether with the specific autonomous and conjugated connotations of these two medias, and in spite of these connotations.' Pardon me?
It's this that makes them more interesting. Women are guerillas; more closed in than At the moment I am writing a story in which there are no women. When Ilooked it over I found it quite powerful: to use women in the same way I used men in Three Women.
speak more and more in their own name.
Doesn't this have an inhibiting effect when you write your I haven't written any novels or books about women. l've made films to which the actors group of companies in the present era of capitalism, WC believe it is high time that the approach we are committed to explore be given the highest priority, however many toes must be trodden on, however political myths sconced me revolora left turn out to need exploding.
We deplore Geoff Sheridan's dismissive attitude which, however, seems to be in other Socialist Challenge articles, such as Tariq Ali on cultural movements and John Ross on the far left in Europe since the But since Socialist Challenge that a feu non-Trotskyists non-Trotskyists might just be capable of brief, sporadic, desultory periods of revolutionary activity, we make so bold as to suggest that the next step might be to debate things with these non-Trotsky rather than generously giving them a retrospective pat on the back contribute not only their talent but also a good part of the content.
Susannah York and I had a great deal of discussion about the role she was playing Images, and whenever ther was a disagreement she won because she had an importan advantage over me, being a woman.
Shelley Duvall wrote her owr monologues for Three Women I only made suggestions or alterations. In the character, one finds her female sensibility or her stupidity. It's this which makes all comedies Socialist Challenge 18 January 1979 page 15
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THE MINDS behind 'Wedge' boggled at Geoffrey Sheridan's critique of this left-wing cultural magazine, published in Socialist Challenge on 26 October. Deploring the 'dismissive attitude' of the article, the