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What
is a collective?
Cezar
Migliorin
When several cinema and audiovisual
groups are named collectives, when Coca-Cola launches an internet campaign
stimulating consumers to be part of the Coca-Cola Collective, when employees of
the Ministry of Culture say they will give incentives to collectives, or when
in public debates filmmakers and artists say they can no longer stand to talk
about collectives, it is time to slow down a little and try to minimally
outline what a collective is.
Multiplicities
Sometimes we must begin with the
obvious. A collective is more than one. Certainly, I believe that up to this
point there is a consensus — even though a lone subject can be
many more. Putting it this way, however, other important variables remain. A
collective is more than one and is open. This is the first characteristic that
prevents us from treating collectives as a group, as something closed; it would
be better to say that a collective is first a center of convergence for people
and practices, but also for exchanges and mutations. That is, the collective is
open and porous in relation to other collectives, groups and creative blocks -
communities.
Such collective practice does not
mean that a collective is created simply by everyone producing together: it is
created because people share an intensity of greater exchanges among themselves
than with the rest of society, with other subjects and practices
and that, in a given moment, find themselves strained with one another. The
collective thus is a formation not of a certain number of people of common
ideals but of a block of interests, affects, dialogues, experiences to which a
certain number of people adhere, reaffirming or transforming this same block. A
collective does not form a unit, but is formed by radiating this intensity, a
condenser, aggregator of subjects and ideas in constant approximations,
distances, adhesions and unattachments. A collective is thus tenuously
distinguishable by its members, its areas of performance and influence, its
movements - a new film, a festival, an urban or political intervention - they
are not done without the collective itself transforming and coming into contact
with other centers of intensity. Certainly all creation is collective, when we
create we are in dialogue; ever since the Greeks, the individual is only
conceivable in relation to others. There is no blank page, starting with
language and the page itself - collective inventions. All creation is a
differentiation, an operation, of montage of what the world
gives us. However, it is not with everything and with everyone that we
establish the same level of interaction and exchange. In this sense, a
collective is a field of privileged exchange, a concentration of encounters of
distinct intensity.
Excesses
We can still affirm that in terms of
desire, investment, creation, a collective is always in a state of crisis as
its members do not articulate themselves in function of an institutionalism, of
a contract or a position in the production chain, but on account of an affinity
that is realized in actions in varied times. A film, a screenplay, a work, an
idea. The necessary heterogeneity and multiple velocities that constitute a
collective thus determine the constant crisis. Keeping
the intensity that crosses a collective depends on the possibility of
supporting and promoting the co-habitation of distinct velocities, inconstant
presences and dedications that are not measurable in money or time, as the
trans-individual intensities guarantee the radiating force of the collective.
For example, a subject or gesture that barely makes itself physically present
can be decisive for maintaining the collective as intensity of connection with
other collectives, forces and creations, allowing participation in networks
that transcend them. The essential instability of a collective is established
by non-measurable investments and experiences, and because of this a collective
needs to co-exist with work regimens that are not ruled by the logic of
measurement - be it temporal or economic. You worked less than I, you earned
less than so-and-so, you did not fix the leak. Indeed, sometimes the
maintenance of a collective is similar to that of a house. These accusations
negate the collective not as “worked” or “earned”, but in the insistence of you
- in regards to the leak, as Gilles Deleuze reminds us, all hydraulic systems
depend on the fluidity of liquid and the walls of the pipes.
Frequently a collective can have a
leader or a subject who earns a lot of money or someone who is high profile in
his or her area. This point outside of the curve is only established once it
enters in a narrative that crosses the collective - financial success, the
logic of celebrity - and comes to operate inside a hyper-meaning of this
narrative inside the collective. The crises of collectives are frequently ways
to incorporate external narratives - which also compose it - without these
narratives standardizing the tension of the multiple that configures a
collective. The crisis configures itself as a process of dismantling the
hyper-significance of harsh narratives. The logic of success that is in
everything and creates a hierarchy in a company, family, classroom becomes
hyper-significant in a collective if it verticalizes and loses the intensity of
connection. The crisis becomes a way of making the point outside of the curve
resemble the leader that Pierre Clastres describes in his book Society
Against the State. In a given tribe, the necessity for a chief
was distinct. His incumbency was very clear: as all chiefs, he should speak for
the tribe. Everyday at the same time, the chief would lie on his hammock and
speak. However, no one listened to him. The children would play around him and
the adults continued their tasks. If by chance
one of these chiefs became an
orator who people listened to and his words started to have meaning in the
tribe, he would soon be substituted. Let us recall Elias Canetti’s hunting
wolves cited by Deleuze:
(CANETTI, 1966 apud
DELEUZE, 1987:37).
“We recognize this as the schizo position, at the
periphery, holding on by a hand or a foot...
As opposed to the paranoid position of the mass subject, with all the
identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader,
and the leader with the group; be securely embedded in the mass, get close to
the center, never be at the edge except in the line of duty
”
(DELEUZE, 1997a:38).
This seems to be the frequent
challenge of collectives. When one leaves the curve, or becomes stray from the
fold,
strategies must be invented for personal force to return to the
collective and the narrative of one to not overlap all. Each straight line,
each strong narrative is achieved to be swiftly abandoned, to become a joke in
the collective without needing to break the straight line. Here’s to success
and money not abandoning us! Thus, when a collective dissolves there is no
failure, unless the dissolution is for adhering to orders that escape the
collective’s inventions, the dominant practices that will make their movement
as impossible as the existence of single and associated individuals,
simultaneously. Failure is the hyperbole of the straight line.
The collective can be formed by a
series of individuals that, looking at the fire, at some centrality, bring the
whole world with them on their backs. Unlike the pyramids, there is no
accumulation of equal blocks that would lead to building something, but in the
non-hierarchical encounter of worlds that we bring on our backs. And these are
the worlds that are mediated in collectives. When filtering the worlds takes
place in a harsh way that is exterior to the collectives, it loses meaning.
Actualizations
There is a pragmatic of collectives.
They become effective in action, in the updates of the encounters that can take
place in the most varied ways: works, films, seminaries, books, symbolic and
economic inventions. When we highlight the procedural character of many works
done by collectives, such a characteristic is not due to the fact that they are
groups or producers that are forged only for executing a task, but the fact
that there is, in these works, a part of the intensity of being together, with
evident consequences for the aesthetic of the works. Work and life update
themselves in works, fundamental in several senses, but never taken as the end
of the collective. Being together, making, connecting, in this way the works
are also contaminated by the force of the collective. A production company
produces films. Within limits, a collective may or may not produce films, and
if it produces them today it may not in the future. When the logic of
collectives gains intensity, beyond pure connectivist or collectivist rhetoric,
it seems to be exactly the moment in which artists, filmmakers and documentary
filmmakers further explored the idea of work as a trigger of encounters,
betting on an intensification of the community through filmic installations, site
specific, spacialization of music, de-specification of the arts and invention
of ways of occupying a space. Works are crossed by an investigation around
organization between bodies and images, normally not ruled by a centrality -
screenplay, author, artist.
Jacques Rancière (2003) vehemently
criticizes a large part of contemporary visual art production that opts for
relational devices and is treated as essentially political art. Rancière
criticizes the lack of conflict and the emphatically consensual tendency of
works that rely on a “being together” of the community and small rearrangements
of the group. Thus, he will say that these works operate inside an ethical
regime - that is, merely prolonging the ethos, the community’s ways of being,
without compromising the organization of parts of the community, those that
have the right to speaking and the sensitive.
Revolution, which remains like a
backdrop to this criticism, effectively has no place. But it would be
excessively reductive to disregard the micropolitical effects of works that do
not operate by ample ruptures, but are accumulative and by putting together
can, indeed, reach the limit of possible harmonies when one is in tension with
what is real. For this, it is not enough to be together, but it is necessary to
actualize contact: difference that
meets difference. In this sense, a collective that forges itself between works
and people with a arm stretched towards chaos - one other potential.
Spaces
Like hydraulic systems, collectives
exist crossed by fluidity and openness, available to new connections but at the
same time depending on fixed points of convergence. Otherwise, dispersion
impedes the configuration of a point of tension, of a radiator of intensity.
This point of convergence may be a space, an environment in which subjects,
ideas and dispersions (of all natures: sexual, hallucinogenic or depressive)
meet the possibility of coexisting. The space frequently forms as catalyst and
reason for maintaining the collective, even when nothing connects, even when
networks are not made or little materializes.
The space of a collective is not an
art studio or a business center, but it tends to contemplate economic,
productive, creative and festive dimensions of the individuals that
comprise it. Crossed by several orders and present in work configurations that
are not pre-established, the space tends to be the point of convergence but at
its interior the fluidity is also large: new walls appear, others fall; room
changes, chairs move from one place to another, walls hold one image, then
another, and the roof gains new contours to avoid excess heat. Even the space
of convergence and consumption of food, coffee and drugs tends to be mobile,
despite frequently being what most resists transformation. And, of course, in
some place there is always a leak or dripping water, both with their beauty.
Networks
Finally, recent years have presented
us with a type of mobilization around cinema and the audiovisual that brings
singularities to the history of collectives. For technological, political,
economic and subjective reasons, we have seen new production and consumption
networks forming. These networks produced a lot for a little, uploaded films
from every period, transformed public policies, multiplied film clubs and festivals,
made the audiovisual very present in the most varied NGOs, schools and
associations, invented criticism magazines, etc. This is not about valuing this
process, but realizing that the notion of the collective reappears in an
inalienable context of this configuration that crosses lives and these several
socio-technical networks. I would say, then, that one of the characteristics of
these networks is to establish the connection between collectives and that
collectives appear as a micropolitical attempt at synchrony with network
movements that transcend them and for which they are fundamental. The
collective is a spot in the network and also a network itself. In building
networks, condensed between multiple actors in an endless space, collectives appear
as centers of concentrating ideas, people, creation, forces where new
connections can leave to compose other networks.
A network is not by principle a
value, but it is difficult to think of a cinema, an art or a communication is
forged in a potent and democratic way and does not go through the expansion of
these networks of people, technology, politics and creations. To be affected by
a film, as viewer or producer, is to become a part of the world, of a
community, of these social and technical networks. In this sense, there have
always been collectives in the history of the arts, but they exist while they
differentiate themselves in time, while they are engaged with what varies in
the present and with the possibilities of creative, political and subjective
updating that do not repeat themselves in time. Collectives exist in the acts
that affirm the present, in operations that do not find answers in other places
but in their own practices.
References
CANETTI,
Elias. Masse et puissance. Paris : Gallimard, 1966.
CLASTRES Pierre. A sociedade
contra o Estado. São Paulo: Francisco Alves, 1978.
RANCIÈRE, Jacques. Le destin des
images. Paris: La Fabrique, 2003.
VIVEIROS
DE CASTRO, Eduardo. Encontros. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2008.
About hydraulic systems, see
“Tratado de nomadologia: a máquina de guerra” by DELEUZE and GUATTARI, 1997b.
