| Andrea Geyer and Sharon
Hayes
by Maryam Jafri
Where does politics reside today? A whole host of
identities sexual, generational, racial, ethnic linguistic, geographic, cultural have
emerged to rupture the presumed stability and unitary nature of the political subject of
feminism, challenging feminism much the way feminism and other social movements of the
60s-70s challenged classical Marxism’s privileging of class conflict as the
definitive antagonism of society. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclaus theory of Radical
Democracy attempts to take into account the increasing fragmentation of social identities,
a trend which they assert that not just Marxist theory but also Liberal theory fails to
adequately address. Mouffe and Laclau critique the Liberal concept of the rational
political consensus because of its failure to deal with the constitutive role of
antagonism within society. They note that difference must not be relegated to a so-called
private sphere in order for a rational political consensus to emerge in some privileged
public sphere. Instead it is important for subjects even within the same political
movement to identify with different, even antagonistic, positions. Difference does not
preclude political action nor is it something to overcome by political confrontation but
instead forms a part of any political alliance.
For their project "Cambio de Lugar_Change of
Place," Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer conducted a series of interviews around
questions of gender/feminism with women in Mexico City and New York City. Geyer and Hayes
chose to keep the same catalog of question for all 27 interviews. All interviews are
bilingual Spanish/English. Their decision to document the interviews for their project
"Cambio de Lugar_Change of Place" by videotaping only the translator, and not
the person being interviewed, calls for an understanding of the subject as always already
positioned within the communal context of language and hence as always already a social
actor.
The interviews reveal that no one political identity can account for the multiplicity
of positions that even a single individual occupies. One of the last questions put forth
however, on the interviewee’s response to the election of conservative canidates
Bush/Fox, underlines the importance of a continued collective political struggle,
particularly with womens access to abortion and other reproductive rights under siege. The
installation problematizes both extreme particularism and a violent universality that
seeks to neutralize difference between subjects. Four rows of monitors, each showing a
different interview, are placed on identical tables. Each monitor becomes a separate unit
in a chain of monitors, each monitor itself a placeholder for a chain of voices and
subject positions, a chain of subjects speaking through and outside of a single translator
on the screen, a potential citizen or member of a contingent political community the video
installation itself.
Contemporary political movements today that privilege either particularism or
universalism are reactionary movements occupying one political space at the expense of the
other. Resistance must position itself against both the hegemony of a minority and the
tyranny of the majority because in fact the ongoing negotiation between an extreme
particularism and a hegemonic universality is where politics resides today. |
