Since Each of Us Was Several: Collaboration in the Context of the Differential Self

Abstract

In this chapter, I will try to develop a concept of collaboration based upon the discussion of two specific collaborative practices: the collaborative philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the collaborative work of the US-based performance company Goat Island (1986–2009). Both of these practices are instances of collaborative-thinking; or better, perhaps, I want to suggest that whilst all thinking-practices belong to a process that tends towards collaboration on the one hand and subjecti-fication or individualization on the other, these particular practices tend more towards collaboration than others—and not just because they involve more than one person. After all, why collaborate, if—as Deleuze and Guattari put it—each one is already several—or if the self, in other words, is already a site of difference and multiplicity? How can collaboration be conceived if ‘self’ and ‘other’ are construed as the by-products, rather than as the basis, for a more fundamental becoming, processuality or we might say, collaboration of all things? What specificity, if any, can be left for collaboration if we acknowledge that the solo artist or author was never self-present or self-identical in the first place? This is an issue that Patrice Pavis has also raised, arguing in the late 1990s, that:

The cause of the current crisis in collective creation is not only a return to the playwright, the text and the establishment after the collective euphoria of 1968. It is also attributable to the fact that the individual artistic subject is never unified and autonomous in any case, but always disperse, in the collective as well as the individual work.