An impromptu interview on a beach in Miami. A casually dressed white woman in her thirties is perched comfortably on a large turquoise chair. “Do you live in a democracy?” asks the director from behind the camera. “Yes!” she replies, without hesitation. She asks the woman a follow-up question: “Do you trust the government?” and receives a similarly instantaneous answer: “No.” There is a paradox here. Although we do not trust those who govern, we cling steadfastly to a word that suggests we live in a society ruled by and for ‘the people’. Democracy: the world’s most notorious empty signifier.
Astra Taylor’s What is Democracy? (2018) searches for the answer to its title across America and Europe, and brings in workers, activists, refugees, professors, and secondary school students to help. In one scene, Taylor stands next to Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici in the town hall of Siena, an Italian city home to the world’s oldest bank (a seemingly trivial fact that proves to be significant). Together they gaze on The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a series of 14th century fresco panels by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. In Athens, a Greek woman chats to her daughter, who is video calling from Denmark. The young woman on-screen talks about how the austerity measures inflicted on the country have upended the lives of her peers – “All of my classmates are leaving. Almost no-one is staying… I hope one day the political situation will be better so I can come back.” A few miles south in the port town of Piraeus, Syrian refugees arrive off the coast, recounting stories of the lives they have left behind. Throughout her journey, Taylor hears many different histories. She visits a worker’s co-operative in North Carolina in the United States, where Guatemalan immigrants work in a non-hierarchical structure and are seeing steady profits. “Two months ago”, says co-operative member Alfonso Gonzalez with pride, “I bought a house.” What is Democracy poses its question in a fraught world – additionally, any American film grappling with the meaning of ‘democracy’ today is confronted with the giant elephant in the room that is the current government. Taylor deals with this immediately. We open to a small discussion circle of philosophers in the garden of the The Platonic Academy of Athens. The discussion closes with a warning from professor Eleni Perdikouri citing Plato’s theories on the corrupting effects of extreme wealth: “[W]hat poor people will do eventually – they will follow any demagogue that will promise them to overthrow the rich. This will, for Plato, lead to tyranny.” The scene promptly cuts to a Republican rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. We hear Donald Trump’s disembodied voice over shots in the parking lot. (By not showing the man himself Taylor avoids doing what other media outlets so often do: fanning the flames of his narrative by circulating his image). A snippet of his speech is heard, as if fulfilling Perdikouri’s (and Plato’s) prophecy: “This election will decide whether we are ruled by a corrupt political class or whether we are going to be ruled by the people.” This is the first and last that we see of him; the rot, Taylor seems to suggest, extends much further.
The people in What is Democracy express such a profound disenchantment with their democratic governments that it almost makes you question the point of the entire enterprise. Doctors employed at a Miami trauma centre recount how the US army sends its soldiers there for “pre-deployment training” in preparation for their stints in Iraq and Afghanistan. Miami is so riven with inequality, says general surgeon Rishi Rattan, that “they see more trauma here than they see in their deployment, in a war zone. That’s not normal.” (You also wonder what these soldiers get up to when they are sufficiently trained and deployed). In Greece, volunteers at one of the emerging citizen-run health clinics give their free time and labour to offer community medical care as austerity measures have effectively destroyed state-run public services. Across state borders, we sense a unifying mood: a palpable mistrust in ostensibly democratic governments that has made it near impossible to envision how to live as a meaningfully empowered citizen. Schoolchildren in Miami, when asked by Taylor if they have any say in how things are run at their school, stare blankly in confusion. It’s never occurred to them that this is an option. After all, they have grown up in a world where democracy has been flipped on its head. Governments that claim to be ‘led by the people’ have disempowered the grassroots communities that live under their rule, while the select elite hold onto the term as a way to block public challenges to their power. Democracy, rather than being seen as a practice that is constantly coming into being through thankless, relentless work, has become instead a self-explanatory fetish object that speaks for itself, stands for itself; a useful rhetorical weapon to blunt any lingering anxieties we may have about whatever it is that these ‘democratic’ governments are actually doing. As self-avowed liberal democracies, we charge into other countries to export ‘democracy’ over there. This happens even when there is large democratic opposition back home (think of the eleven million across the world, for example, who protested the war in Iraq in 2003). A commitment to ‘the people’ has become a useful way to harm, undermine, and disenfranchise other people while maintaining your own high-minded bloodlessness (consider the common defense invoked against criticism of the Israeli government’s systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinians – but Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East!) ‘The people’ – an amorphous, undefined mass who always seem to conveniently agree with your divisive ideas, especially when they involve the denigration and brutalisation of other people.
So how has democracy been emptied of meaning? Astra Taylor and Silvia Federici offer an answer: the accumulative and rupturing dynamic of capital. When the duo look at The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena, they see a panel depicting the high, imposing towers built by the city’s historic merchant and banking class. Federici notes that these phallic symbols of power show how social life began moving away from ideas of common good and towards competitive domination. (This is an essential, yet often ignored thesis – that our modern forms of domination have stemmed from overwhelmingly male conceptions of power.) Yet even then, she observes, the origins of exploitation were material and visible. This made revolt and resistance easier. “Those with power were within reach”, Federici comments, “You could think of overthrowing them.” Now, capitalism has become invisible: “Today, you don’t even see the physicality of money.” How does one meaningfully ‘resist’ when your exploiters have been abstracted into algorithms cooked up by artificially intelligent machines in the halls of Goldman Sachs? To bring that point home, What is Democracy offers up a modern-day parable – Greece’s failed attempt to resist the European Union’s austerity measures in 2015. Although 61.3% of voting citizens rejected the measures in a referendum over the summer, the measures were passed anyway. Again, the infernal question comes back to us: What is democracy?
Some try to find other culprits. Vox pops in Miami see predominantly white interviewees invoke the spectre of the ‘job-stealing immigrant’ when talking about their own anxieties (a young woman takes pains to make clear “I’m not trying to be racist because I’m not”). In Greece, Hasan Hmeydan, a Syrian-Greek man, drives alongside the port of Piraeus and talks about how refugees in other European countries must give up their precious belongings for the ostensible purpose of ‘funding their assimilation’ (perhaps a nod to Denmark’s controversial “jewellery law”, which allows police to strip asylum seekers of any ‘non-sentimental’ valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner). His experience with Greece, however, has been much better. He finds hope in how the country, “going through one of its greatest hardships since World War Two”, nevertheless has people willing to forgo paying their own bills to support the lives of new refugees. These same tensions concerning who is included and excluded in democratic projects are revisited as theoretical tensions in academia. At the University of Berkeley in California, Taylor asks political scientist Wendy Brown whether democracy can include everyone. Brown replies that democracy should be bounded by a “constitutive we”, while qualifying that these exclusions throughout history have “always been premised on terrible forms of marking, stratifying and naming who is human and who is not human”. Although Brown has been highly critical of the border regimes of the modern nation state elsewhere, the conversation left me dubiously curious about the mechanics of arriving at a bounded but generous democratic “we”, given the dark ends to which the pronoun is often used today.
Taylor approaches What is Democracy with a radical humanism that may have easily tipped the film into a slick survey that, in the interest of displaying “all sides”, ends up saying nothing. Interviews are deceptively easy, straightforward. Nearly every interviewee gets a title card that states their name. Breaking convention, Taylor holds back from accompanying these names with the details of their professions; the humanity of her subjects needs no further tethering. Conversations are relaxed, never showy; experiences are plumbed and recounted, but never aggressively questioned. Yet the sequencing of the scenes shows Taylor’s own hand. Interviews with people fear-mongering about immigrants are nearly always followed by accounts from immigrants themselves. As you hear their stories of seeing violence in their former nations only to face new forms of it in their new ones – or, just as importantly, avow that they, too, belong – you realise how much fear, cowardice and alienation feed the growingly popular narrative that these individuals – a Syrian teenage refugee whose mother is recovering from being shot in conflict, a Guatemalan co-operative worker whose young son is taunted by classmates parroting Trump-era deportation threats on his way to school – have brought about the decline of Western civilisation.
This narrative, after all, is startlingly at odds with the inconvenient and bloodied facts of history; ‘democratic Western civilisation’ as it is commonly envisioned has always been intertwined with a legacy of exclusions, hierarchy and debased violence. If What is Democracy is concerned with envisioning a genuine communal society that affirms the dignity of all people, Gabrielle Brady’s Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018) considers those who have been excluded from this possibility today. The hybrid documentary follows Poh Lin Lee, a trauma counsellor to refugees held at the Christmas Island detention centre. A small leafy Australian territory south of Indonesia, Christmas Island has a more sanitised public image: it is popularly known as an idyllic holiday destination where tourists can go scuba diving, bird-watching, and observe the 50-million strong community of native red crabs. Island of the Hungry Ghosts is, in some ways, a refraction of Taylor’s documentary. What is Democracy opens up the notion of ‘the human’. Its ethics are grounded in the belief that people’s experiences can stand on their own, and that there is something valuable to be found in the act of listening (though not necessarily always agreeing). Taylor’s subjects look into the camera, neutral and open. Brady’s documentary, on the other hand, finds its footing in the idea of absence. The film never ventures inside the detention centre, and so the lives of refugees are instead reconstructed, retold to Poh Lin during counselling sessions at the local hospital. This is, in part, a pragmatic choice: the Australian detention complex is, like most others, hostile to external scrutiny. It is suggested that refugees are shuttled between the detention centre to her hospital in guarded vans. At one point in the film, Poh Lin drives in the dark, listening to a radio anchor discuss the government’s passing of The Border Force Act, which makes it illegal for employees at the country’s detention facilities to talk about their work. Those who do risk two years in prison. Reflecting on the documentary later, Poh Lin notes that she knew of the risk but decided to go ahead with the film anyway: “It was far more important to document their stories at that stage.”1
The patients in Hungry Ghosts remain unnamed, and are filmed in fragmented close-ups and profile shots. We see only brief slices of the counselling sessions. A close-up a woman’s forehead, eyes and nose. “I feel like my inside is full of experiences and stories”, she says, and describes friends taken suddenly from her with no notice, transferred to other detention centres across Australia’s island territories. Another young man recounts being forcibly separated from his mother, and the guilt he feels at seeing her get increasingly ill over the course of their visits. Then there are those who are entirely absent, who make a booking at Lee’s clinic but do not show up. She attempts to trace them by calling the wardens at the detention centre but is batted back by disembodied bureaucrat voices heard over speakerphone. No, they can’t tell her where this person has gone. No, they can’t tell her where they are being held. No, they can’t even tell her if they are still on the island.
When Poh Lin is not in the clinic, she walks with her family around Christmas Island. It feels strange, given the context, to see these lush, roiling forests, volcanic ridges and sea-battered cliffs; to look on as the island’s native red crabs crawl around their domain. The roads are closed off to make way for their migration, as the bright red traffic sign puts it. Lin takes her two young daughters to a Ghost Festival ceremony with the island’s Chinese community. There, locals burn offerings to appease the spirits of the first arrivals on the island, who came as indentured labourers for the British colonial government 100 years ago. As the island’s inhabitants walk hand in hand in the forest to visit the graves of their ancestors, said to have died extracting minerals from the mines, you get a sense that they do not feel entirely in control of their own lives, pulled instead by animal migration patterns, colonial histories, and the mercurial appetites of ghostly ancestors. A cliché is proved true: barbarism can exist in the most tranquil places, kept hidden. This is not to erase the palpable differences between the lives depicted in the film. There is a major difference between the situation of the ghost-feeders of Christmas Island and the state-sanctioned disenfranchisement of the refugees held in the island’s detention centres, and Hungry Ghosts does not aim to conflate the two. The film acknowledges its own limitations – that it, too, as a story about asylum seekers, individual trauma, crab migrations and island histories, cannot assert anything with definitive authority. It simply wants to show you a picture. Brady is keenly aware that she will only be able to see a little of the life that the state aggressively tries to hide. As her film progresses, Poh Lin’s concerns about her job grow. She becomes increasingly skeptical about her efficacy as a counsellor and more convinced that she is just another complicit body propping up the country’s sprawling detention industry. When she decides to move on from her job, it is positioned not as an all-powerful, loud symbol of rebellion, but as a personal decision arrived at through a painful and considered judgment of what it means to do good. Poh Lin leaves her job and we finish the film, but the Australian detention complex rolls on: although Christmas Island’s detention centre was briefly closed in October last year, the government once again reopened the complex in March. People still pass through its doors, sit in shuttered cells, separated from their loved ones, their fates uncertain.
While talking to Wendy Brown, Astra Taylor admits that she struggled with the idea of centering her documentary around such a contested term, “but I kept returning to democracy”. Brown sees her own conflict as symbolic of democracy’s broader crisis, acknowledging that ‘democracy’ as a concept has been appropriated to serve “terrible purposes”. By recognising this appropriation, she suggests, we can begin to crystallise what a meaningful, emancipatory ‘rule by the people’ might look like. It may be that we will discover very different iterations of ‘democracy’ beyond the horse-race electoral system of today. What is Democracy and The Island of the Hungry Ghosts are two very different films, but they offer up a similar thesis: that it is only by recognising the profound limits of our lives, public imaginations, and the legacies left by our histories that we can begin to move past them meaningfully. They also offer quiet celebrations of the ability of people to come together and realise the world they want to see. Although Hungry Ghosts is a film about the limitations of individual power, there is an important, subtle rebellion that frames the work itself – Poh Lin agreed to have her life, so embedded in a notoriously secretive detention complex, publicly documented for an international film. This is a quiet, understated form of protest that does not purport to change the world on its own, but wants to do what it can nonetheless. I am reminded of the dedicated activist groups in What is Democracy across Athens and Miami, as well as the doctors, workers, and students, who grapple with our histories and current limitations in order to do what they can. There is, after all, a disjuncture between rhetoric and lived reality. The history of Western democratic liberalism is strewn with doggedly optimistic affirmations that obscure the messier, darker and profoundly disempowered state of our own lives. We Westerners are told we are enlightened progressive engines of history; yet the luxury enjoyed in our own nation states is inextricable from horrific exploitation and conquest both domestically and abroad. We are told that we honour equality among all people, a statement that sweeps aside the suffering and deaths of those who can barely afford to live. We are told that we can be agentive, enlightened live-your-dreams masters of our own lives. This parable of individual mastery underplays the uncomfortable truth that conventional success, in our current world, always seems to involve some form of domination over others.
Then again, who is ‘we’? Who are ‘the people’, so commonly invoked in the service of divisive political projects? The history of democracy is full of outright and subtle exclusions. Any attempt to paper over the histories of violence that shape our lives in the service of maintaining the appearance of self-control – whether that is oft-repeated slogans that our country will take back control; that patriarchy will be stamped down if we girlboss our ways with confidence through office spaces; that it was only 2016 that saw the collapse of an otherwise unimpeachable world order – can in fact produce the opposite intended effect. The pain felt by the subjects of What is Democracy and Hungry Ghosts cannot be easily re-routed to fit the narratives of liberal optimism. And maybe this is a good thing: to listen to the misfortunes of others, your own failures, and the dogged histories that intertwine you both. The democratic project radically affirms a belief in human dignity – this is worth saving. It has, however, yet to be realised in our history thus far. Maybe the only way to get there is by acknowledging how undemocratic we really are today, while also recognising how powerful we could be if we weren’t. Both Taylor and Brady’s films encourage us to open ourselves up to new forms of life; to feel compassion for others in a world that makes it difficult; and to unapologetically fill up the emerging spaces of political contention that are flourishing today. To believe in the seemingly unbelievable. Or, as the title of Astra Taylor’s new book puts it, “Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
1. Quoted in Patrick Barkham, “The film that reveals an island idyll’s traumatic secret”, The Guardian, Jan 2019.
Rebecca Liu is a staff writer at Another Gaze.
This essay first appeared in Another Gaze 03. You can buy the issue here. If you like what you read please consider donating.
