By Stamatina Gregory
The good life, as examined in Aristotle’s Ethics, engages both
philosophical contemplation and the practice of “ethical
virtues” which involve the participation in the life and affairs
of the Athenian polis, or city-state. In the third book of his
Politics, Aristotle details the possible involvement of citizens
in these affairs: taking part in deliberative assemblies, holding
rotating positions in government, and having a share in judicial
office. His accounts reflect a conception of politics as an integral
part of social life, instead of a separate and distinct sphere
of social activity (such as economics, religion, or the aesthetic),
to which it is relegated today; even the Greek verb for “to be
a citizen” is synonymous with “to be active in managing the
affairs of the city.”1 Although the “state” of citizenship excluded
broad swaths of the population such as women, foreigners,
and slaves, the structure of the average Greek polis required
an individuals’ commitment to civic participation far outstripping
what is expected of the average citizen in the modern
nation state.2
This classical conception of democracy is something
that philosopher Hannah Arendt sought to recuperate in The
Human Condition (1958), finding in Greek and Roman antiquity
an extensive privileging of political life and political action
which she felt had been lost in modernity. Her work critiques
the trajectory of traditional Western political philosophy as
an autonomous enterprise that holds itself above and apart
from the world of practical human action. Arendt asserts
that a philosophy and life of labor, work, and action—the vita
activa—must form the basis of democratic participation.3
For Arendt public speech is characterized by action and
is the means by which individuals come to reveal their distinctive identities, encounter one another as members of a community,
and exercise their capacity for agency.4 She holds up the
Athenian polis as the model for this active space of disclosure
and communicative speech.5 It is this conceptual space for
speech and action as set forth by Arendt, as well as the formal
attributes of the democratic spaces of antiquity, that Carlos
Motta evokes in his project The Good Life.
Since 2005, Motta has traveled in Latin America,
recording over 300 video interviews with civilians on the streets
of twelve cities, asking questions about individuals’ perceptions
of U.S. foreign policy, democracy, leadership, and social
inequality. These dialogues form the basis of the project, which
Motta originally initiated with the intention of forming a public
archive of opinions on these subjects. Hailing from Bogotá,
Colombia, Motta was interested in how U.S. interventionism
was perceived across the continent, as well as in understanding
the role of these events on the development of his own perceptions
of what it means to be a citizen, an acting subject in
society. Basing his itinerary on cities that had been influenced
by specific historical circumstances (sites of failed revolutions,
military coups, and economic reforms), Motta, together with
local assistants, sought out a range of individuals to speak with
in each city. His dialogues with students, teachers, activists,
laborers, etc. resulted in a spectrum of opinion which fluctuated according to local situations and forms of government.
In Santiago, many responses touched on the overthrow of
former Chilean president Salvador Allende in a military coup;
in Buenos Aires, the recent economic impositions of the
International Monetary Fund were a source of discussion. The
dialogues explore the political and social landscapes of each
city and the interview subjects’ lives, unearthing personal
narratives and revealing a breadth of collective memory. Each
dialogue takes place outdoors, in parks, in plazas, or on sidewalks,
transforming public space into a space of action through
public disclosure.
In an installation at the Institute of Contemporary
Art in Philadelphia in early 2008, viewers encountered these
interviews as a nine-channel video installation. Monitors were
mounted on a four-part, two-tiered wooden structure that
was an abstracted reference to the Priene, the theater and
general space of the Athenian agora, in which citizens not only
bought and sold goods, but met, debated, and participated
in legislative and judicial decisions. The position of the monitors on the structure allowed them to metaphorically function
as speaking subjects—citizens—in the space, addressing
their comments to a wider forum. In a further evocation
of Arendt’s space of public disclosure (and her theorization
of the vita activa, or “active life,” which became increasingly
important to Motta over the course of the project) the structure
also created a space for viewers to sit, physically placing
them among the previously recorded speaking subjects.
The walls surrounding the structure featured an installation
of over 500 video stills, printed as five by seven inch
snapshots. Images were grouped together geographically and
chronologically; as in the videos, they were unlabeled (although
an image of that country’s flag preceded each grouping).
Thematically arranged, the stills examined select aspects of life
and visual culture in each city; the path of a religious penitent,
public stations of the cross for Catholic parades, graffitied
political statements, and monuments to failed revolutions.
As photographs, these images functioned as indexical traces
of physical events created by interventionist policies and their
aftermath, symbolically surrounding the “speaking space”
of the structure. Placed throughout the space was a newsprint
publication, in which artists Ashley Hunt, Naeem Mohaiemen,
and Oliver Ressler, and political theorist María Mercedes Gómez
presented short essays in response to the question “What
is democracy to you?” from different perspectives and using
different approaches. Both the use of the video medium
and the inclusion of this “newspaper” referred to mass media,
now closely associated with the idea of public speech
in Western society.
The Good Life takes a seemingly straightforward
documentary approach to the interview process, and makes
overt references to the democratic spaces of antiquity. Neither
strategy, however, is presented as unproblematic. The formal
structure of the videos underscores the centrality of the
speaking subject. Unlike some documentary work which focuses
on the performative interaction between the interviewer or
filmmaker and their subjects (along the lines of Michael Moore),
Motta keeps the camera on the people he is speaking with,
and his presence limited to his questions being read and heard.
This is not an effort to efface the role of the interviewer or
artist; rather, it functions as an acknowledgment of the critical
importance of speech as action, and as a way for the dialogues
to symbolically function as open and public.
Much like Arendt’s recuperation of the Greek paradigm,
the project acknowledges a singularly powerful, if clearly
imperfect, precedent for the theorizing of a new political model,
a model that must first undertake a critical reevaluation of the
meaning of the word “citizen.” The model from antiquity is
critiqued on a number of levels, and an aspect of the contemporary
problem of citizenship is directly addressed in the
newsprint publication by Ashley Hunt. In his essay “Tricks of
Logic and Constellations of Time,” Hunt examines the relationship
of the prison system to systemic disenfranchisement and
racial control. As an institution which has enabled lawmakers
to not only strip individuals of their rights as citizens, but to
also disable specific voting blocs and disrupt collective political
identification, he identifies the prison as an instrument of the
state, one which lies squarely in opposition to democracy.
Motta’s complication of the model provided by antiquity
is also made clear through the exhibition’s formal attributes.
The supportive structure was built in the round, around a distinct center point, fitting together into an abstracted, compacted
replica of the Priene. However, in this installation, the structure
was split into four parts, splayed across the exhibition space
in a way that underscores its fragmentation, but which still
allows for proximity and intimacy among the pieces. This
arrangement seemed to acknowledge the fundamental split
between the classical model of democracy that the project
formally evokes, and of the democratic models and political
realities of our modern world, which the subjects in the videos
describe. Moreover, it makes a statement about the contested
nature of the term “democracy” itself; a complex multiplicity
of ideas over which people in political theory, social movements,
and cultural practices hold their own sets of debates.
Among the plethora of opinions on the concepts of
democracy presented in The Good Life, one in particular recurs:
the view that democracy necessarily means more than a single,
occasional vote on a predetermined issue, or a vote for one
of a set of pre-selected political candidates. A Caracas historian
that Motta interviewed points out that the recent efforts
in Venezuela to integrate ordinary citizens in decision making
processes through community councils qualify that country
as a democracy. An 80 year-old Buenos Aires woman declares
that, despite her age, she has yet to have “lived in an ample
democracy,” while a lawyer in Guatemala City disavows the term
completely for any country limited to electoral processes. In
listening to their statements, it becomes apparent to the viewer
that Arendt’s well-known arguments against representative
democracy have a popular echo. For Arendt, the relinquishing
of day-to-day deliberation and action to a small number
of holders of power destroys the “space of appearance”
in which citizenship can be fully realized.6 The recuperation
of this space clearly occupies a wider political imaginary
for Motta and his subjects.
Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe has written extensively
about the impossibility of a wholly emancipated model
of representative democracy, as well as the inevitable failure
of the linked idea of rational consensus in decision-making.
She describes how both these concepts are inherently flawed
as they stem from the universalizing concept of liberal individualism,
a hegemonic viewpoint that has only increased
with the tide of globalization and that effectively dismantles
possibilities for collective action.7 The idea of rational
consensus—the assumption of collective agreement about
a set of predetermined issues—ultimately fails to acknowledge
the constantly shifting dimensions of power, social divisions
and pluralities of interests and demands. Mouffe notes the way
the rhetoric of consensus effaces discussion of these pluralities,
particularly in the recent attempt to shift political
discourse toward moral polarities instead of partisan ones
(witness the increasingly popular calls for “bipartisan” coalitions
to address economic issues in the US government, paired
with now-ubiquitous rhetoric on “evil” and “the enemy”).
Mouffe argues that citizens need the possibility of identifying
with a range of democratic political identities. This
diversity of identities must extend beyond a traditional liberal
interpretation of pluralism, which assumes that an infinite
number of voices and values can exist harmoniously under the
spirit of individualism.8 She proposes that instead of rational
consensus, we need a consensus of conflict. To this end,
she postulates a model that she calls “agonistic pluralism,”
which incorporates an awareness of the exclusions and power struggles inherent in society, and integrates these shifting
dynamics, and the identities they form, into decision-making
processes.
Motta’s multivalent project suggests such a democratic
model. It presents both a multiplicity of voices, but also
demonstrates how those voices coalesce into collective identifications;
of nationhood, of class, of vocation, and of social
and familial roles (such as the Argentinean activist group
Mothers of Mayo that he interviews). By taking as its point
of departure the examination of the political and social
landscape created by policies of intervention, The Good Life
project underscores the inevitable shaping of those identities,
and of all political identities, by conflict.
The project also touches on the profoundly affective
nature of the political. Whether manifested in a life of labor
activism, religious devotion, hip nihilism, or radical adherence
to nationalist myth, political identification (or dis-identification)
is ultimately a process of emotion, which any democratic
model must take into account.10 Although a subject of political
theory, the role of affect is not lost on ordinary citizens: as an
interviewee in Tegucigalpa clearly states, “For democracy, there
must be love.” The multitude of narratives in The Good Life,
many of them poignant (such as a tale of mass extermination
of stray dogs in Santiago), draw us in with their emotional power, and thereby make that power clear. The elaboration of these
narratives makes the case for a democracy of multiple positions,
and incorporates us into an ongoing, participatory effort to
both speak and to understand.
From "Carlos Motta: The Good Life":/store_items/96
