I am preparing for the 10th meeting of the undergraduate seminar I am teaching this fall term on “The Collective Afterlife of Things,” in which we will discuss “The Last Political Scene,” an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, conducted by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin and published in their co-edited volume, Art in the Anthropocene.

At one point, Lotringer makes an argument that I find entirely relevant to our current situation, following the US Presidential election. A situation that includes the mass protests taking place in front of institutional architectures (Trump Towers, US embassies, etc.) and the reliance on Facebook (and all other social media platforms) to express discontent:

There is no civic mobilization possible because there are no civilians anymore; we have all been turned into warriors, part of a war because war and technology now mean the same thing. We are powerless because all the tools that we have—all the little trinkets given to us by the CIA and NASA, etc.—are there to turn us into the soldiers of the death of our civilization.

Earlier in the conversation, Lotringer makes the distinction between critique and collective action. Where critical counter-discourse is claimed to be that which “plays into the hands of the institution, of what it is supposed to criticize. Occupy Wall Street was an intimation of what could be done, but it didn’t go all the way. It stopped at the door of the institutions.” While in contrast, collective action experiments and creates unforeseen forms of being-with, together and in-common.

Yet as Lotringer goes on to argue, in the midst of anthropogenic species extinction, these forms of sociality must not lose sight of the fact that this very collectivity is living the last (political and critical) scene, and thus the collective task is to learn how to exit gracefully. Including in our relations with inorganic and inanimate things (as well as those organic lifeforms) that will survive us. In other words, today our ethical-ecological task concerns the afterlife of things, after “life.”

This calls for what Lotringer and I (and several others) see as an “art of disappearance:” of creatively engaging with and ethically exiting from this terminal scene. As Lotringer clarifies, this is something like non-art art. Meaning, art produced for reasons other than aesthetic (i.e. in terms of beauty, or perhaps even of the sublime). It is the art of the already-unmade and the anonymous. It is this kind of art, technique and praxis that we most need to partake in today; the kind that in its anonymity bears the signature of the common (of no one name), and as already-unmade affirms that existence is that which will forever remain un-finished. It is in this way that we might become something other than the soldiers of the death of our civilization.