Florian Schneider: Collaboration

Missing Citation

Formatted as seven “notes and propositions,” this paper addresses the following three questions:

Question One: It is in principle, possible to make a relevant distinction between cooperation and collaboration and to what end?

Response: FS argues this distinction is not only possible but also imperative for understanding the problems with “education” as it currently exists. His distinction between collaboration and cooperation is, however, eccentric. Largely void of references to complimentary/divergent definitions and approaches, the text in general would benefit from greater contextualization within current debates about socially engaged practice, be it art, education, software development or some other form.

Question Two: If so, what characterizes the constellations, social assemblages and relationships in which people collaborate?

Response: Think: access rather than ownership; connections rather than ideas; self-interest rather than false sentimentality; flexibility rather than conviction; precarity rather than certainty

Question Three: Does this have an impact on education?

Response: FS argues that current education is essentially cooperative (see definition below) rather than collaborative. In his estimation, current educational practices over-instrumentalize in knowledge. “If a model of collaboration were to be applied to educational cultures, then it would have to accept an inability to predetermine outcomes even while sharing a set of aspirations or directives or being anchored in a set of problematics” (6).

Having established “working together” as an unsystematic mode of collective learning, FS asserts that collaboration needs to (1) be understood in terms of labour relations indicative of a contemporary (political) sensibility; and (2), be differentiated from cooperation. For FS, cooperation as a romantic notion grounded in common values but comprised of clearly distinguished elements. Collaboration, on the other hand, is a process through which co-producers affect one another. If collaboration pivots on singularity and self-interest within the context of knowledge flows, cooperation turns on hierarchical exchange involving one-way information transmission, as in the case of authoritarian teacher-student interaction.

Ultimately, asserts FS, collaboration offers an inspirational impulse for realigning social relations in the classroom by rethinking knowledge flows in particular (exemplified by his reference to Rancier’s discussion of Joseph Jocotot, a FSL teacher who instructed Dutch speakers using a particular method of translation). To this end, FS sees the future of education less in terms of achieving certain criteria and more in terms of gaining competency affecting and (re)structuring its own field.

Collaboration and Cooperation: Are not defined as easy categories; rather, they are defined in relation to one another

Collaboration: + History of idea: references the French Vichy campaign (Marshall Petain)

+ “…expresses a differential relationship made of heterogeneous elements that are defined as    singularities” (5).

+ “extra-ordinary, insofar as it produces a discontinuity and marks a point of unpredictability however    deterministic (5) because it’s often difficult to differentiate components of this process...(This seems    to relate to FS’s understanding of collaboration in terms of flow instead of exchange.)

+ Involves a rhizomatic structure; knowledge grows “exuberantly and proliferates in unexpected ways"     (6).

+ “Wild praxis” (7).

+ “Every collaborative activity begins and ends within the framework of the collaboration. It has no    external goal and cannot be decreed; it is strict intransitivity; it takes place, so to speak, for its own    sake” (6).

+ “Collaborations are voracious” (6).

+ P2Ps are sometimes motivated by a desire to refuse the absolutist power of organization (7).

+ Collaboration challenges scarcity and inequality while struggling for the freedom to produce (7).

+ Emphasis is placed on outcomes rather than components (4).

Cooperation: + involves identifiable individuals within and between organizations (6).

+ takes place in client-server architectures where each part of the process is defined in relation to other    parts and a continuously reproduced relationship (6).

+ student-teacher relationships

Note One considers the recent history (and failure) of “working together” in pedagogical practices and advanced capitalism. Special emphasis is placed on knowledge exchange.

Education in the 1970s: Emergence of “joint learning activities” and “project-based learning” (educational teamwork) intended to break authoritarian teacher-centered. Assumption: going things together is better.

Industry: Andrew Carnegie: “Teamwork is the ability to work toward a common vision, the ability to direct individual accomplishments and organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to achieve uncommon results” (2). = move towards “lean production” (car manufacturing crisis [date?])

Advanced capitalism: “…the notion of teamwork represented the subjugation of worker’s subjectivity to an omnipresent and individualized control regime.” (2) Group = replaced “foremanship” = peer pressure leveraged for productivity = small groups/multi-skilled co-workers

But FS argues that in practice, teams don’t make the best decisions for various reasons: + They’re poor at negotiating complexity

+ Team members often hoard rather than share knowledge. (insufficiently explicated or justified in FS’ text)

+ Group dynamics can be challenging

+ It is difficult to account for external pressures

+ Bad management is common (FS doesn’t say what this means or why it occurs)

(No references offered to substantiate these claims)

“Yet, as knowledge became the main productive force, neither the free wheeling and well-meaning strategies of anti-authoritarianism nor the brutal force of coercing cooperation seemed capable of establishing any new dimensions of the dynamics of working together” (2).

Note Two further critiques the way these concepts promote transparency and equality as organizational ideals on the one hand while actually strengthening regressive power in the form of cypto-hierarchies (to use JJ King’s term) on the other.

Note Three explores collaboration as a process: not as exchange but as flow where positions are avoided all together; “…it does not entail transmission of something from those who have it to those who do not, but rather the setting in motion of a chain of unforeseen accesses.” (3) Regrettably, FS does not define these points of access, except to frame “collaboration as flow” as less about granting access and more about recognizing all those people involved in the process. Why, how and to what end this might be accomplished is not addressed in the text.

Curiously (and also confusedly) FS also argues that the virtue of collaboration is that it is a black hole. In contrast to cooperation, those collaborating are entirely self-interested (?)…(4).

Note Four includes a provocative (if muddled) figuration comparing and contrasting the pedagogue and the coyote:

The pedagogue (from the Greek meaning to draw out and referencing the family slave charged with walking the child from a private house to a place of learning)

and

The coyote: the escape agents that facilitate human trafficking (which involves moving people across a threshold. FS touted as the coyote as perfect role model for collaboration and education in part because it generates pure potential: the promise of a better life, etc. It engenders something very precious and precarious. In FS’s words, “pure imagination…yet potentially beyond measure.”)

This figuration:

+ destabilizes the idea of knowledge in movement as something that’s always progressive while at the same time emphasizing that it’s mobile

+ observes and validates seams of illegitimacy in collaboration, thus troubling collaboration as an idealized (good) interaction, an approach aimed at foregrounding the popular perceptions of collaboration as a “moral” activity.

Note Five looks at collaboration against the backdrop of a postmodern control society. One of his more interesting arguments, FS asserts that collaboration constitutes an attempt to:

+ Regain autonomy

+ Secure immaterial resources

So, it’s less about ownership than access: “…not generously granted accessibility but a direct, immediate and instant access, often gained illegally or illegitimately” (5).

Access and excess

So: + Making and maintaining connections is more important than capturing and storing ideas + One’s own production may be specific but it’s generated and multiplied across networks [read: to affect and be affected]. + This produces an excess of relational flows which are beyond measure + Access is bound up with “voluntariness, enthusiasm, creativity and immense pressure” (5) on the one hand and self-doubt on the other. Constantly threatened by insecurity and precarity, “working together” constitutes a less than ideal form of immaterial labour.

Note Six calls for a critical reevaluation of (1) all this access and (2) this access as excess. FS identifies the knowledge worker as a life-long student. He encourages “self-disorganization” or “unorganization” as a critical maneuver for thinking through the implications of all this collaboration.

Note Seven celebrates collaboration in terms of distributed non-hierarchical information architectures such as peer-to-peer networks. Originally designed to exchange immaterial resources such as computing time or bandwith, these networks developed into hubs for content exchange such as music sharing.

Lossless sharing = the shared object is multiplied rather than divided.

Limitations: To be fair, these are self-declared “notes and propositions;” FS describes them as a “work in progress” in a nettime.org message dating back to March 21, 2007. (see http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0703/msg00029.html) With this said, they’ve been published in "Academy", ed. by Angelika Nollert, Irit Rogoff, Bart De Baere, Yilmaz Dziewior, Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann, and Dieter Roelstraete (Revolver Verlag)…So they’re in print, however unlikely.

I say this is unlikely because they’re not only disorganized but also infuriatingly cryptic at times. The distinction between collaboration and cooperation is never really clarified. Parts like FS’s reference to collaborations being “black holes of knowledge regimes” are also opaque (7). Significance for my research:

+ It considers “working together” in terms of educational practices

+ It offers a brief history of collaboration

+ It attempts to distinguish between collaboration and cooperation

+ It provides a curious yet potentially useful definition of collaboration as being about access and flow

+ It maps “knowledge work”

+ It challenges collaboration as an implicitly “moral” approach

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