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gentle collaboration

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gentle_collaboration

 

Gentle collaboration is a viscous fluid. Scattered small spaces of anarchy are where individuals go about the non-intentional design of their everyday environments. The silent game plays out continuously in accumulations of interactions (to use Chia and Holt’s 2009 term) between individuals on a terrain of the infinite game. In gentle collaboration it is not possible to discern starts and ends, but punctuations, flows, localized swellings, and fluid terrains are always already becoming the non-intentional landscape. This view values the individual, recognizes localized swellings, and provides a lens through which to begin to understand the wider system wisdom in terms of wayfinding rather than explicit strategy (see e.g. Chia and Holt’s 2009 discussion of ‘the silent efficacy of indirect action’). This concept invites comparison with other larger scale modes of collaboration such as (for example) commons-based peer-production (Benkler, 2011) and stigmergic processes (e.g. Elliot, 2006).

References

Benkler, Y. (2011) The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self Interest. New York: Crown Business.

Chia, R.C.H. and Holt, R. Strategy Without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elliot, M. (2006) Stigmergic collaboration: The evolution of group work.  M/C Journal. 9 (2). Available from: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php . [Accessed: 18 May 2014].

A Viscous Fluid (Trance-Like States)

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Walking all day through industrial estates in the rain; Napping on a berm to the cackling of weed smokers in a nearby house; Zoning out in front of a stew of beans. These trance-like states are the viscous fluid which greases our everydays. They quieten the chatter in our heads, make space for unexpected connections and fuzzy digressions that we have seen reappear in our subsequent work and collaborations.

To value such trance-like states is to be open to the ‘generative and provocative’ reframing power of the experiential (e.g. Kilbourn, 2013:70) and to follow Oreton’s example and ‘…revel in our fieldwork as an activity saturated with sensory, corporeal experiences…’ (quoted in Bain and Nash, 2006:100). In light of the psycho-cognitive mutations and mental suffering that Berardi (2009) delineates this aspect may be one of the most important. It opens a crack in our worklives for deceleration, demobilizing productive energy, and thus savouring the pleasure and meaning in work experience. A viscous fluid cannot connect. Rather it is a caress and envelopment that seeps into cracks and seams, providing a mucus terrain for the uncertain conjunction and thus collaboration of stuff.

References

Bain, A.L. and Nash, C.J. (2006) Undressing the researcher: feminism, embodiment and sexuality at a queer bathhouse event. Area. 38 (1). p.99–106.

Berardi, F. (2009). Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of post-alpha generation. EMPSON, E. and SHUKAITIS, S. (eds.). Semiotext(e).

Kilbourn, K. (2013). Tools and movements of engagement: design anthropology’s style of knowing. In Gunn, W., Otto, T., and Smith, R.C. (eds.). Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. New York/London:Bloomsbury.