Безымянные сообщества

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.