Безымянные сообщества - страница 17

The anonymity of the Soviet. In order for it to be discovered as such, in its non-alienating aspect, it has to be both hidden and shown. What is this «other» of the Soviet that transforms all visible signs crowded in a photograph into a historically meaningful image? I would tentatively call this «other» forces of the private. It is not just private life rendered visible in a captured moment, be it swimming, celebrating, picking mushrooms and the like. It is that which never enters visibility, but which seems to blast wide open, to decode all public (but also private) spaces in unprecedented ways. The thrust of life itself, if you will, or that primary distinction — forces of the private versus substance and representation — that accounts for visibility. Such forces work their way through and across existing social forms and definitions. They contextualize our vision of the Soviet in a very special way. It is by imagining or rather fantasizing their existence, something prompted by the changing nature of the Photo, that we succeed in recognizing and acknowledging «that» moment today.

And we do so by switching on to «them», by creating some sort of a circuit. «We» and «they» are interchangeable. Or rather «we» and «they» form the only possible continuity of history, a history yet to be written. Which is not to say that this history will be written. It is unwritten precisely in as much as it avoids closure by speaking for and in the name of an indeterminate collective — the anonymous community. Yet, this possibility is itself historical. It opens up in a time of so many devastating ends and endings and is thus a promise. Something is still promised to us.

In conclusion let me briefly and, therefore, somewhat irresponsibly sketch out other instances of a thinking of anonymity, at least of a thinking that contains this potential. In a book which by the standards of our time is old, but not outdated — I am referring to the Différend published in 1983 and to a subsequent study L’enthousiasme (1986) — Jean- François Lyotard examines Kant’s «critique» of history. He is specifically interested in the strange status of what Kant calls Begebenheit and what is translated as «sign of history». Kant’s task, it should be explained, is to answer the question (against the Faculty of Law, and there is indeed an ongoing conflict) whether it can be affirmed that the human race is constantly progressing toward the better. The requested demonstration is complicated by the fact that neither progress, nor the human race, being objects of Ideas, can be presented directly, which is only aggravated by the phrase itself having an explicit bearing on the future. Moving away from any intuitive given (Gegebene), Kant comes up with his most intriguing concept of Begebenheit, an event or «act of delivering itself which would also be an act of deliverance, a deal [une donne]» (the Crakow manuscript calls it Ereignis). This event would merely indicate and not prove that humanity is capable of being both cause and author of its progress. Moreover, the Begebenheit must point to a cause such that the occurrence of its effects remains undetermined with respect to time. Being on the side of freedom, it may therefore intervene at any time in the succession of events.

I will hasten at this point just to show where and how exactly Kant comes up with his answer to the problem. He does find an index, a Begebenheit of his time, which for him, predictably enough, is the French Revolution. However, he makes a necessary and exciting detour. For the Begebenheit, strictly speaking, is neither momentous deed nor occurrence, but «the mode of thinking (Denksungsart) of the spectators which betrays itself publicly in [the] game of great upheavals…». This «mode of thinking» is simultaneously universal (albeit not lacking in partiality) and moral (at least in its predisposition), in a word, progress itself. As for the French Revolution, whose outcome remains unknown, it «nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators <…> a wishful