Recent contextualizations of collaboration, collectivity, and collective producing often gesture towards a “paradox of collaboration” and collectivity (Weizmann 2012: 13, my translation), (*18) particularly regarding the terms’ passed down meanings of complicity with hegemonic, authoritarian, or neoliberal structures and politics: collective working can indicate political complicity (cp. Weizmann 2012), (*18) a neo-liberal project-based work-mode and company structures, but it can also be found in movements of resistance (Marchart 2012: 39). (*11) Performance theorist and maker Bojana Cvejić discusses the question of substituting “collectivity” for “collaboration”—prompted by a question that came out of planning a performance project around the theme of collectivity:
If collaboration is a buzzword for a working habitus in performance today, collectivism is abandoned, or even repressed and repulsive in its very idea […] Collectivity in the models we chose to remember is relegated to ideological disasters or social breakdowns, as if doomed to always fall into fascist regimes of collaboration (Cvejić 2005: n.p.). (*10)
This is true particularly for continental European contexts. In fact, journalist, psychologist, and educator Mark Terkessidis begins his most recent book Kollaboration with the assertion that collaboration “does not enjoy a good reputation in continental Europe” (Terkessidis 2015: 7). (*16)*4 *(4) In continental Europe, Terkessidis continues, “most people think of the German occupation during the ‘Third Reich’” and people who were complicit with it either because they believed in its ideology or because of the lack of courage to stand up against it (ibid., my translation): (*16) negative associations that carried over into cold-war times. The English “collaboration,” however, has increasingly gained importance, in the economic and corporate sector, when combating environmental problems, as well as in politics (ibid.). (*16)
Bojana Cvejić, Irit Rogoff, Mark Terkessidis, and Gesa Ziemer test, probe, and seek to make resonant, rethink, or develop new models for thinking about collective working in the arts. Gesa Ziemer proposes the term “Komplizenschaft” (“accomplice-ship”)*5 *(5) as a social model that may provide the basis for thinking through contemporary modes of creative and collective authorship (2012: 124 and 127). (*20) Ziemer uses the notion of accomplices to distinguish this particular mode of collaboration from other forms such as teams, alliances, networks, and friendships (ibid: 125): (*20) teams are pragmatic and goal-oriented, while alliances tend to be strategic cooperations aimed at securing a status of power (ibid: 125-126). (*20) She re-defines “accomplice-ship,” which is linked to the legal notion of collective delinquency in a criminal context, and instead proposes to view collaborators of a subversive enterprise as accomplices who get together in order to establish alternative orders (ibid: 124-125). (*20)
Mark Terkessidis (2015) articulates collaboration as the guiding principle of the parapolis (2015: 10) (*16) in the contexts education, arts, and aesthetics as well as critique (Terkessidis 2015: 14 -15). (*16) The parapolis is the “ambiguous, quasi illegitimate” version of the polis (Terkessidis 2015: 9), (*16) a para-city marked by multiple-ness and difference as its basic conditions, requiring institutions that can account for its multiple-ness and are barrier-free vis-a-vis difference (cp. Terkessidis 2010). (*17) In the context of the “un-integratable” multiple-ness of the parapolis, Terkessidis proposes collaboration as a form of community in which belonging is not marked by coercion and control, which emphasizes the joint work of Independent individuals (Terkessidis 2015: 329). (*16) Collaboration can render multiple voices audible—a prerequisite for the functioning of this society of multipleness (cp.Terkessidis 2015: 13). (*16)
Sandra Chatterjee ( 2015): Rethinking Collective Artistic Production. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 06 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/rethinking-collective-artistic-production/