Безымянные сообщества - страница 14

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