done.

In the U.S., too, anti-feminist backlash,
somewhat reminiscent of the Stalinist attack on
women’s freedom, splits American feminism
down its uncertain center. Though reformists
suggest that there is room in a liberal America
to heal the wounds of women, liberalism is par-
ticularly dangerous since it cleverly masks its
own conservatism, its own investment in the
status quo. Liberal ideology neatly instantiates
the two-part form of the contradiction. “Its
progressive side provides a rationale for defend-
ing the rights of individuals against the state. Its
reactionary side emphasized that capitalism is
not a system where one class exploits another
but is rather a collection of individuals, any
one of whom can succeed if he or she so
decides.”6

| hope it is becoming clear how ideologically
messy liberalism really is from a post-humanist
perspective in which the individual can no
longer be seen as the subject of history. Liberal-
ism is seen by leftists as a joke because it bears
so tenuously the wan hopes of a bankrupt hu-
manism and is, ultimately, untenable. Even
hard-core conservatism is more internally co-
herent. Conservatives and Marxists alike might
describe capitalism as a system in which the
“stronger” individuals make out. The difference,
of course, is that conservatives say so approv-
ingly, grounding their argument in the old dog-
eat-dog theory of what they call human nature.
Marxists have favored the idea that the industri-
al capitalist system tends to pervert or alienate
what is potentially, or at a given historical mo-
ment “good” in human beings. Stated so simply,
both are inadequate readings but at least they
rehearse the consistency of these positions.

The liberal wants to enjoy the fruits of his
class privilege while salving his guilty con-
science with a quasi-philosophic posture pro-
posing that every individual (being protected by
‘equality’ before the law, by ‘equal’ opportunity
measures, etc.) could theoretically be enjoying
this same privilege if he or she were as hard-
working and dauntless as him/herself. Thus the
liberal buys off with a little charity or minimal
social welfare all those who, by some extreme
individual misfortune, can’t quite cut it.

Here we return to the underbelly of co-opta-
tion. While a bill assuring equal rights before
unequal laws is flung in our faces, and even
defeated (adding insult to injury), the dominant
media simultaneously declare the women’s
movement to be “over” or somehow “won” be-
cause of the presence of one and a half news
anchor-women on TV or the financial viability
of Ms. Magazine. Capitalist propaganda demon-
strates before our eyes that by inference, if one
woman can do work that one man can do, wom-
en are the achieved “equals” of men. The re-
sponsibility for change is thus cleverly switched
back onto the shoulders of individual women;

to change the world, all you really must do is
change yourself. And the mapping of contra-
dictions comes full circle.

The liberal feminist, like the liberal social
democrat, learns to sate herself on the token
goodies she is tendered. Or the radical feminist
(who, lacking a viable mass strategy, is a liberal
in disguise) tries to build a separatist island on
which she and her sisters can be “free.” It's a
dilemma. | was, and in some ways still am, such
a radical feminist. After all, | am a member of
the women’s group which publishes this maga-
zine. We try to experiment with anti-oligarchic
forms, collective practice. But what is an egali-
tarian island in a sea of capitalist contradictions
but something doomed, as it were, to sinking?

Witness a little linguistic contradiction and
the issues it raises for us in Heresies. We are
constituted as a collective. Adopting one of the
stronger aspects of feminist practice, we at-
tempt to chip away at the hierarchical authority
structures of The System on a micro level by
attempting to produce a theoretical magazine
on a collective basis. The assumption here is
that theory and practice must develop together
in a dialectical relationship. But in order to
function as a legal entity, we are transformed to
Heresies Collective, Inc.: an incorporated col-
lective. This is either redundant or ironic. The
fact is, we don’t even aspire to making profits
but are completely dependent on the legal and
business structures around us. This dependence
relation, the impossibility of autonomy within a
given economic structure, has meant about a
two-year life-span for most American collec-
tives before us, according to popular lore.

This dependence also means that artists, par-
ticularly those artists being forced by height-
ened economic contradictions to face political
realities, must re-examine their place in our
culture. The feminist filmmaker, for example,
has had to confront this issue head on. Film,
more than any other artform, requires the mas-
tery of machine technology. For women, that
technology and the authority it connotes has
been historically taboo. There are exceptions in
the history of film7 but the percentage of wom-
en filmmakers is dramatically low for a 20th-
century art. Feminists with the energy and sup-
port of their sisters in the movement have begun
to break that taboo. But in doing so, they have
been thrown against a major contradiction
facing all “independent” filmmakers: the prob-
lem of capital. For to make films requires large
amounts of capital, capital which is controlled
by the ruling classes, middle-class liberals
included.

Advocates of independent filmmaking from
Maya Deren in the 1940s (implicitly) to Annette
Michelson in the 1960s (explicitly in her article
“Film and the Radical Aspiration”8) have pro-
posed that a stance outside of the commercial
market is itself a “political” gesture. It is—to the

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