Безымянные сообщества

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.