William Kaizen
Two phrases caption a photograph by Rainer Ganahl: in the upper right corner, “Aux yeux du people”; in the lower right corner, “In the eyes of the people.” The image is part of Ganahl’s Basic Languages series, exploring the connections between places and the local vernaculars spoken there. The series features snapshots taken as he studied the local language, layered with texts taken from the books that he used to study them. These particular phrases come from a textbook designed for French-speaking Quebec students to learn English, but given that he is Austrian and a native German speaker, which text translates the other is unclear. The two texts reinforce this ambiguity, both speaking languages of colonization, speaking for two countries in which democracy, as the politics of a sovereign people, emerged almost simultaneously at the end of the eighteenth century. The image to which they are attached is a makeshift signboard like those used since antiquity to post messages in the commons. It is the modern equivalent of the site where the social intersects with the linguistic, where law, news, and other forms of community interest are fixed and held in common. Here this site is decrepit and forlorn. The foundation of democracy in the public square as a place for contract and disagreement has been displaced. As the automobiles at the left suggest, democracy has been driven elsewhere by new forms of mobility and connected to new types of public and private space. The image is of a place in Canada, a country whose very existence is based on the legacy of colonization and the logic of capitalist competition, expansion, and mobility. With the return to democracy in Europe, “the people” were constituted as sovereign only by holding a fundamental contradiction in suspension: that these people were sanctioned by universal human rights on the one hand and rivalrous national identities on the other. Attached to the post are two identical flyers, reading, “La repression est un cauchemar. Il faut se réveiller!” (Repression is a nightmare. Wake up!). Signed by the COBP, or the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality, this is a message against state power, as it both allows a people to cohere and keeps them in check. Just visible in the photograph, scrawled between the two flyers, is another, wilder text. Written in marker, directly on the post, are the words “Les Italiens contrôlent le Québec,” “Italiens” constituting a further threat to the already riven French-English community of Quebec. Here is yet another reversal of the consolidation of the people: racism as something that all communities seem to hold in common as part of the “basic” local language, where the vulgar ties that bind people together come undone through xenophobia and paranoia.
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