Безымянные сообщества

«всеобщий интеллект», как заявляет Вирно, может приводить к распространению иерархий и личной зависимости в сфере производства. Но чем бы ни стало такое состояние дел в один прекрасный день, оно уже существует, указывая на сингулярную, потенциально подрывную констелляцию. Для обозначения этой меняющейся реальности можно подобрать другие слова или образы. Суть дела в том, что у нас, похоже, есть обязательство, причем в полном смысле совместное: избегать раздачи имен, учиться различать следы будущего в настоящем.

The Anonymous Community[*]

Why anonymous community? I would first of all like to clarify the meaning of these terms, since they have been extensively used (and perhaps abused) in way too many contexts. They have been assigned a value-judgment, have indeed become domesticated. For community, in its ordinary usage, stands for a group, an identity and a belonging, no matter how fuzzy or indeterminate its actual contours may be. Anonymity, for its part, is something that we, individuals, as members of highly developed societies, are taught to scorn and avoid — the very ethics of social existence demands achievement and success, therefore a radical breakaway from hopeless anonymity. Indeed, what could be worse than remaining just «anyone»?

But let us try to reverse the perspective. Let us try to develop a non-substantive view of community and to speak up for anonymity. Let us come up with an apology of both. In my task I am greatly aided by the already existing thinking on community. I am referring to a constellation of thinkers, itself a community, who have been the first to raise these issues. Bataille, Nancy and Blanchot — a helpful point of reference, the beginning of a thinking of community. (However, as I hope to show later, there are other beginnings, and that is what makes the task so challenging for us today — finding insights related to a different time and place, but already imbued with the same passion, already mapping out a future commonality of thinking, if I am permitted to say so.) These three thinkers have posited a type of adhesion that precedes all socially definable or established forms: a belonging without any guarantee of belonging. Community, according to this reading, always already exists and yet remains unattainable. It exists as the ultimate possibility of cohesion, which no single existing society can ever implement. Or, to be more exact, it harbors this possibility, which reminds of itself in various forms. (According to Nancy, it can be traced in the very myth of community that societies so painstakingly produce and maintain; then in what he calls «literary communism», or the continuity of writing cutting across a variety of literary institutions; also, in the non-dialectical nature of love which poses a challenge to thinking as such; and, finally, in the decline, the disappearance of divine names, which opens onto the advent of nothing other than community.)

To sum it up, or to give a new take on the subject, community is that which is devoid of any communitarian «essence». Indeed, no such thing exists. If we think of a «place» for community, it remains «in between» — shapeless, it is rather about the «between», as in the phrase «between us» or «between you and me». An interval which never ceases to create a bond without actually bonding; a touch, provided that it happens at the very limit where singularities (unlike subjects) communicate. However, community is also about questioning communication and communion — and, therefore, about resuscitating the once lost unity, that of non-alienated, «intimate» life. (Here is where Bataille’s problematic predictably comes in: in the blue of noon — a powerful recurring metaphor — the individual remembers: it is some sort of awakening, a deja-vu, opening onto the lost immanence of being. In this immanence, one might say in this impossible community, men are unaware of the limiting laws of production — they are both «sacred» and «bare».)

In any case, we are invited to think community as having no substance, therefore never reduced to any one of its possible representations, and as resolutely avoiding closure. I would like to pick on these challenging insights in order to suggest a reading of community that will hopefully link it to some of our own basic concerns, given that «we» are historical beings, undergoing a certain moment in our no less historical lives, a moment for which definitions, no matter how tentative, already abound: the post-modern and even the post-postmodern, the post- industrial, the post-historical (another variant of history?), and, on a more modest scale, the post-Soviet itself. I would like to analyze this moment by discussing «anonymous communities», incomplete and indefinable collectives attested to primarily by their fantasy lives.

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.