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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 co
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.
Synonymous with experience, anonymity belongs neither to presence nor to re-presentation. As such, it ca
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.