Безымянные сообщества

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 ope

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 way through and across existing social forms and definitions. They contextualize our vision of the Soviet in a very special way. It is by imagining or rather fantasizing their existence, something prompted by the changing nature of the Photo, that we succeed in recognizing and acknowledging «that» moment today.

And we do so by switching on to «them», by creating some sort of a circuit. «We» and «they» are interchangeable. Or rather «we» and «they» form the only possible continuity of history, a history yet to be written. Which is not to say that this history will be written. It is unwritten precisely in as much as it avoids closure by speaking for and in the name of an indeterminate collective — the anonymous community. Yet, this possibility is itself historical. It opens up in a time of so many devastating ends and endings and is thus a promise. Something is still promised to us.

In conclusion let me briefly and, therefore, somewhat irresponsibly sketch out other instances of a thinking of anonymity, at least of a thinking that contains this potential. In a book which by the standards of our time is old, but not outdated — I am referring to the Différend published in 1983 and to a subsequent study L’enthousiasme (1986) — Jean- François Lyotard examines Kant’s «critique» of history. He is specifically interested in the strange status of what Kant calls Begebenheit and what is translated as «sign of history». Kant’s task, it should be explained, is to answer the question (against the Faculty of Law, and there is indeed an ongoing conflict) whether it can be affirmed that the human race is constantly progressing toward the better. The requested demonstration is complicated by the fact that neither progress, nor the human race, being objects of Ideas, can be presented directly, which is only aggravated by the phrase itself having an explicit bearing on the future. Moving away from any intuitive given (Gegebene), Kant comes up with his most intriguing concept of Begebenheit, an event or «act of delivering itself which would also be an act of deliverance, a deal [une do