‘Being in common’: Theorizing artistic collaboration

Abstract

Inspired by in-depth interviews with members of the international Brussels dance community and the work of some of the authors associated with autonomous Marxism (P. Virno, A. Negri, G. Agamben), the practice of collaboration within contemporary dance is elucidated from a theoretical point of view. Like other forms of creative or immaterial labour, artistic collaborations mobilize various generic competences and invoke in an often implicit way a cultural common or series of conventions. Processes of joint creation are usually project-driven, which results in a common cause, and generate a social common characterized by 'co-opetition' and trust. A productive collaboration again and again elicits singularizations of the participant's potentials that at once un-realize personal proclivities and realize the shared generic capacities in a way that is nevertheless still indirectly marked by the bracketed subjectivity. The hope that processes of singularization will regularly happen greatly motivates today's collaborations within contemporary dance. They indeed bet on the promise of a genuine social productivity that supersedes both the traditional forms of labour.division and a mainly calculative investment logic. The social common produced in collaborative practices simultaneously comprises many moments in which the question of artistic worth or aesthetic value is exlicitly adressed through group discussions and discursive negotiations. These instances of collective interpretation and valuation either anticipate or are part of processes of collective decision-making that point to a politics of.commonalism, whose principal stake is the furthering of 'the commons' through a common deciding 'beyond representation'. In this sense, every artistic collaboration is a contingent experiment in democratizing democracy