Needless to say that art has the greatest capacity for revealing the truth of the moment. In my own research I have been particularly indebted to some of the current practices of photography where it reaches the very edge of visibility. No longer simply showing what is to be seen, photography triggers off collective fantasizing — but it does so in a necessary way. For our access to history, indeed our experience of history, is mediated through these fantasies, which seem to condense and materialize, in an almost impossible way, the very conditions of seeing. Photography, therefore, simultaneously renders the visible and the conditions of visibility, and in this it is undoubtedly historical.
What are these imagining collectives? And whence the necessity of such imagination? Here, finally, we must return to anonymity. Instances of anonymity are many. The most striking one, perhaps, is what has been pejoratively called the banal by being implicitly set against the individual and the uncommon. However, the banal seems to map out a new space of commonality which does not reduce to the artifacts of the banal and to their use in common. What banality points to is a new form of subjectivity emerging in «post-societies», call them whatever you will, or, to be more accurate, a new form of partaking — that of stereotypes. In terms of photography and its theorizing it would most certainly mean this: «my» photograph as the epitome of individual affect, the site of an unwritten personal story (to remember Barthes’ astonishing project), gives way to «whatever» photograph, dealing with an affectivity which is a priori shared. And the «bleak», interchangeable surface of «whatever» photograph is precisely the space of anonymous freedom.
There is no use showing pictures, or at least almost none. What I am talking about has little to do with the material certitude of an image. It has to do with the image coming into visibility when it is recognized by a fantasizing collective. And such recognition is twofold. On the one hand, the image crystallizes into a meaningful whole, i.e., emerges precisely as image, whereas on the other, it gives rise to a fleeting collective that recognizes itself in the image. Neither viewer as such nor the fantasizing collective exist prior to these dreams. We might say that fantasies return or, better still, are restored to the dreaming collective, for what is recognized is exactly this mode of being-in-common. There is no other «content» to dreams except for affective partaking.
But let us not be entirely hostile to material surfaces. Surfaces, objects, artworks are the sites where fantasies, however temporarily, reside. The latter are just so many displacements of representation, of the represented. But, as I have tried to indicate, fantasizing is connected to a certain moment when the understanding of the passing time undergoes dramatic changes. Discontinuous and out of joint, time today is either reified by being sliced into decades, which, as a way of grasping one’s own immediate past and present, is itself a form of historical consciousness (here I am referring to Fredric Jameson’s seminal interpretation), or, time is, so to say, enhanced, rendered whole in one’s imagination. Reified time is the presentation of a space or unit, whereas time whose wholeness is achieved through the workings of imagination is an attempt to come to terms with nothing other than experience. Fantasies are the simple indication that experience took place. However, by the same token, they are never arbitrary.
What is at stake is indeed experience, anonymity as shared experience. Examples of negative anonymity are too painful and shocking to be cited in passing. Yet, everyone is well aware of this anonymity-towards-death, which remains to be tackled theoretically. Anonymity-towards-death, I will remind, is a polemical figure that Giorgio Agamben addresses to Heidegger, who, with his philosophy of being-towards-death, implicitly asserts the value as well as the dignity of the individual faced with this existential «decision». The reality of concentration camps, however, points out a different mode of existence, in actual fact of survival, — one in which the symbolic value of death itself is brutally denied. Negative anonymity, therefore, has to do with the utter loss of «humanity» or what undeniably appears as such. However, in those wholly indistinguishable faces, in those violently wasted lives there is something that remains — indeed a «remnant», to use Agamben’s term. It is a blank in life and in death, in memory as well as in language. Yet, being constitutive of post-war subjectivity, the remnant is precisely what guarantees our humanity. Agamben refers to the structure of shame, but I will stick to experience.
Experience is something that remains essentially un(re) presentable, given that we are not talking about the experience which is accumulated and stored. Experiential knowledge, positive knowledge, the continuous flow of human memory enriched by experience — we are referring to no such thing. Obviously, there are less traumatic examples of experience and likewise of anonymity than the one I cited a moment ago. But what appears indisputable for all the cases in question is that experience calls for translation. Otherwise it runs the risk of perpetrating a nightmare, coupled and eventually replaced with just another form of ressentiment. Or this experience will simply fall into oblivion together with the collectivity to which it occurred. Collective experience, or the experience of a collective, demands articulation. To link this to my preceding argument, it has to be recognized.
So let us once again return to anonymity. Anonymity has always been treated as that homogeneous backdrop against which individuation takes place. Moreover, forms, subjects and values would come into being by virtue of surpassing this inertness, by way of leaving it behind. Therefore, it would be something like a springboard for future social incarnations and, on a different level, would serve as a metaphor for the unpleasantly amorphous. (Think of the «anonymous reader» — there is nothing more disconcerting, even now, than the socalled anonymous reader, someone no true writer or academic, for that matter, really wants to address. Art in general, to be sure, has been a form of individuation par excellence, a way of positing values, and this has been done against (both in contradistinction and in opposition to) something that remains stubbornly indifferent or inert — shall we say anonymous?) But let us think of anonymity as standing outside the binary division: if we still choose to call it background, then there will be no figure to set it in contrast against. Or, rather, every figuration would appear as a fold of the anonymous, while anonymity would be reminiscent of a primary element engendering the world itself.
Synonymous with experience, anonymity belongs neither to presence nor to re-presentation. As such, it cannot be represented. But what is represented, especially today, can point to anonymity as an essentially shared experience. What is the Soviet? (The exploration is facilitated by our addressing the topic retrospectively.) What is the world that has crossed the threshold of globalization? What is the world for which this definition remains empty, providing not even the slightest hint of a descriptive discourse? What is private life in the obvious absence of privacy? These and other related questions spring from an unresolvedness — there is no answer to them, at least no answer from «us», who are undergoing this kind of experience. But while being «in» (or «inside») experience, we do form transient communities, irrespective of our actual social identifications. Experience, to be sure, cuts across accepted identifications by suspending and dramatically reworking them all. It opens onto a space of commonality (likewise communality), a space interspersed and laden with affect.