The Collective Afterlife of Things

John Paul Ricco’s “The Collective Afterlife of Things” is a long-term research project, and a fourth-year seminar taught by Ricco at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The course explores how artworks contend with the contemporary moment’s lack of confidence in the long-term future of social, intellectual, and environmental ecologies. As a prospective student of Professor Ricco, I sat down with him to discuss the ideas behind the course prior to its September 2019 commencement.

What began and continues to fuel your interest in this topic?

“The Collective Afterlife of Things” is a multi-faceted project full of points where art and aesthetics, eco-ethics, the inanimate, and extinction converge. For the past thirty years, all of my work in one way or another has thought about the relationship between art and loss—and how art can be a means of contending with loss, yet in a way that is not redemptive, mitigating, or part of some reclamation project. Instead, I’m interested in art that stages and affirms the undeniability of loss, and that calls for our active and collective participation in sustaining that sense of loss as a major motivating force for action. This project most immediately responds to the current context of climate change, environmental devastation, and political and ideological shifts that have torn at the fabric of social solidarity. Existence is finite, fragile, and therefore needs to be cared for; in my mind, each part of this equation is a collective rather than an individual concern.

Your research uses the term “things” in a very broad sense, including its ability to create a sense of collective familiarity amongst people. Can you define what you mean by “things”? And, why is thinking through these “things” useful for analyzing our current issues?

“Things” encompass material and physical objects, but subjects can also be things when they are seen, used, or cared for in certain ways. Descartes famously divided “things” into res cogitans (things that are thinking) and res extensa (things that are extended spatially). Since then, continental philosophy has complicated this distinction and rendered it less definitive and stable. In my work and in the work of many others, the thinking thing is always an extended thing, and our attention to extended things can also liberate us from an overly anthropocentric perspective. Current issues demand a more eco-cosmological approach, one in which the human, life, and bios are only a tiny fraction of what constitutes the eco-cosmos, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to overly determine our thinking and engagement with the world.11When invoking “bios,” Ricco refers to its more limited definition and common usage, one that takes “life” and specifically “human life” to be the irreducible principle of any politics. Here, Ricco is making a distinction between the bio-political and the eco-cosmological.

How do art, film, and literature function as tools for thinking about the realities of climate shifts, the afterlife, and the apocalypse? Why do unfinished artworks play an important role in this analysis?

In facing extinction, the unfinished artwork is a key example of the modality of the terminal in which the work itself—and one's engagement with it—is about acknowledging and affirming the relation between the “ends” of the thing and its incompletion. If a work of art has loss or extinction “built into it” through a process of incompletion that calls on us to participate in the withdrawal of the artwork or some part of it, this then is a collective sustaining of the work’s terminality—its ongoing un-finishing. Felix Gonzalez-Torres has produced key examples of unfinished artworks, where stacks of sheets of paper or pieces of candy are accompanied by an invitation to take a sheet or piece. Through this participation, the artwork is incessantly moved towards its disappearance, such that the work can be said to exist as much in its collective un-making as in its individual making.

When confronting the Anthropocene and the effects of climate change, the process of decolonization is crucial. How does your background in queer theory influence the way you think about decolonization and the topics of this course?

My work in queer theory has been specifically interested in non-appropriative relations to people, places, and things, and modes of rapport that are not about having, claiming, or occupying in any extended or permanent way. For me, intimacy is the name for this relation with the world that does not operate via the will-to-possess. Cruising for sex, and other such hookups, is an example of how one can be in the world in such a way that one can have meaningful exchanges with people, places, and things that do not require laying claim to them. Since art is a practice that relies on making traces, I question if there’s a way that art can also participate in this meaningful collective rapport, but in ways that do not claim permanence and that leave hardly a trace. This may involve a commitment to other types of art forms that are not about materiality, but rather involve the immaterial, the momentary, and what might not need to last.

Using the word “collective” suggests a shared understanding of the future, or a shared future reality. But when we talk about “our” future, who are we talking about? How can we account for difference and experiences of oppression or marginalization in imagining a collective future?

If there’s a shared sense or understanding of the future that is experienced on a collective level, it’s something like a profound and undeniable sense of uncertainty. Yet there is something meaningful here, in that without such implicit or unquestioned assurances about the future, we can’t take the future for granted as though it’s pre-given—instead, we need to create it.

Just as the future doesn’t belong to any one person or group, it also cannot be claimed in the name of any imagined collective totality. I’m interested in the innumerable and incalculable multiplicity of “things”: this is a philosophy and a politics based upon the understanding that the world is made up of parts and there’s no way of bringing them together into a single whole. Instead, it’s about the parceling of the world, in which political questions arise such as: how does this parceling take place; how do things get distributed; and how one can (or cannot) be allowed to partake in them? So in the seminar we read After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, in which Jean-Luc Nancy argues that we share a common inequivalence.22Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). But what capitalism has done is to institute a logic of general equivalence that is upheld by the instrument of money as the measure of value. Nancy says that if we're going to talk about equality, we have to strive for an equality of inequivalence. I would say that oppression and marginalization are the means by which that inequivalence is no longer taken to be the only source or condition of equality, but instead is used to institute and perpetuate all kinds of inequity. Rather than following the capitalist idea that we should figure out how to be equivalent to one another, we need to find ways in which your singularity and my singularity can relate to each other without any general measure, except for our shared sense of finitude, uncertainty, and incompletion.