Безымянные сообщества

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.

Anonymity, therefore, has nothing indistinct or obscure about it. It is, on the contrary, the moment of greatest clarity that one could possibly expect: on the one hand, it indicates a primary bond apropos experience, a bond already in place, while on the other, it shows that there is no readymade collective which would neutralize and thus forget this experience by way of assimilating it. Anonymity is a flash of the false and living memory of a community that is constantly being reborn.

The spectators of Cindy Sherman’s famous «Untitled Film Stills» dating from the late 1970s insisted on having seen «those movies». Of course, it was impossible to attribute them in any meaningful way, besides a viewer is not an art historian. The tremendous success of these photos lies in the fact that they were recognized by the so-called ordinary people. What Sherman managed to produce was a dreaming collective — a collective dreaming history itself, whose experience is strongly mediated by the movies. «A democracy of glamour» — this is how Laura Mulvey has defined this imaginary construct of the fifties: something being close and even stored in memories and at the same time endlessly remote, for the experience of time is itself from now on imagistic, cinematic. But again, this is not a pictured image. Rather, it is a crudely constructed representation which gives way to collective fantasizing. The image is forgotten in as much as something else attaches itself to its surface — this something, this invisible supplementation is precisely the way in which Sherman’s pictures form a space of commonality. Such commonality, to be sure, is profoundly affective, for the image of that time is itself a shared experience of history.

The cruder the image, the better for our common dreams. A material surface is just the site of so many ruins. However, they are brought to bear on a greater, seamless whole, because each of those details, in its turn, has been touched and magnified by so many aspiring glances. What the viewer «sees», therefore, is nothing other than this aura — a detail that has already been sublated, transfigured, suffused by the dreamworlds of others. (I am referring here to a term carefully examined by Susan Buck-Morss as well as to a phenomenon she has so originally analyzed precisely by putting it into a historical perspective.) In other words, instead of categorizing his or her historical experience, the viewer allows it to «float» in its pre-semantic openness and overabundance.

The same kind of exploration seems to have been carried out by my compatriot Boris Mikhailov. However, Mikhailov not so much plays on the cinematic-historical as he traces lines of continuity for Soviet experience or the experience of the Soviet, to be more accurate. I would take the liberty of summing up his work as follows. Experience never allows for a plenitude of meaning. While it is taking place, it lacks in meaning, it is meaningless, in fact. At best we can hope to focus on what Raymond Williams has so aptly called «structures of feeling», a form of sensibility that is still in the making. Needless to say that structures of feeling are short-lived. They may roughly indicate a decade or a generation. Also, they are quite diffuse. But what they do point out is a collectivity having its emotional, i.e., fantastic, phantasmatic stakes in the passing moment. This is exactly what is lost in the master narratives of history. Barthes, as we remember, was scandalized by the irretrievable loss of the «unknown» individual as well as of his or her emotion. His great book on photography is an affirmation of filial love. But no less can one be scandalized and saddened by the loss of whole collectives, whose only «objective» quality would consist in their shared affective being.

To return to Boris Mikhailov and his lifelong endeavor. What he has been trying to do is to translate this blank or omission — the emotional lives of the generations that are closest to us, of our fathers and grandfathers. What do we know about them? What will we store in our memories, especially if historical memory in my country was denied at one point as such? How can we hope to preserve the truth of «their» moment if we know very little about it, almost nothing at all? Again, I am not referring to a knowledge of facts and/or dates. I am talking of the experience of the Soviet with a special emphasis on both of these words. And if I have already briefly spoken of experience, let me now concentrate on the Soviet. The Soviet that Mikhailov is showing us — and here lies the greatest paradox of his photography — is in fact the doubling of representation and its visible signs (which are also signs of the Soviet: ethnographic details, culturally coded landscapes, etc.) with the invisible, an act which allows for this very reading to take place. Only the punctum, to use Barthes’ term, or the implied photographic reference, has to do with an a priori existing collective. What is posited here, in other words, is a spectator who does not stand in some sort of contemplative isolation (such is the paradigm of classical art). On the contrary, in order to «see», you must already be part of a dreaming collective. For these pictures, very much like Sherman’s series, become truly visible through a shared affectivity that keeps resurfacing in them.

I am not talking of empathy. Contemporary works of art are not empathetic. Their stakes are much higher. They allow you to enter a space of commonality, which is the very condition of seeing and likewise recognition. And they do so in various ways. To return one last time to Boris Mikhailov. If the continuity of experience ever takes place (something I mentioned above), it is by setting against each other, i.e., juxtaposing or putting into play, two types of experience. The Soviet reaches plenitude in the post-Soviet, and, presumably, the opposite is true. It is by making both form a constellation, in the Benjaminian sense, that we can hope to uncover the meaning of this historical juncture. At a moment when our «own» past seems to be completely disowned — for what are we, bearers of a post-Soviet identity — can we hope to come closer to that other «omission» which is the life of our fathers.

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