Economies of collaboration in performance more than the sum of the parts

This is a book about collaboration in the arts and specifically about the common assumption that working together produces something that is “more than the sum of its parts”.8 This is an

More than the Sum of the Parts

Karen Savage Dominic Symonds

Karen Savage · Dominic Symonds

Economies of Collaboration in Performance

More than the Sum of the Parts

University of Lincoln

Lincoln, UK University of LincolnLincoln, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-95209-3 ISBN 978-3-319-95210-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95210-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947396

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Acknowledgements

This is a book about collaboration, and it’s therefore appropriate that

we acknowledge the many collaborators who have contributed to ing it possible It’s also a book about economics, and like many econ-omies, it’s sometimes the very minor elements that end up having an enormous effect So we would like to recognise all of the passing com-ments and conversations from friends, families and colleagues that have set our thoughts stirring, sometimes knowingly, but often unwittingly

mak-In particular, we’d like to thank all the cast and crew of Sweet FA (2009),

a collaborative project during which our thinking about this topic first began We’re grateful to colleagues and students at the University of Lincoln and the University of Portsmouth with whom we’ve been able

to test some of these ideas and to both those institutions for enabling our research by funding periods of research leave, study trips and oppor-tunities to share our work at conferences We have presented many ele-ments of this material over the last ten years, some of which have been developed to appear in the final publication, and some which have been discarded as our thinking moved on In particular, we’ve been hugely supported by members of the Intermediality and Music Theatre working groups of the International Federation for Theatre Research and partic-ipants at various iterations of Song, Stage and Screen and Performance Studies International Aside from our scholarly networks, this book has been stimulated by an array of performances, productions and events, and by the creative work of dozens of practitioners whose collaborative projects have inspired us We’re indebted to our publisher and the staff

at Palgrave Macmillan who have encouraged us in the writing of this book In particular, we’ve valued the assistance of Paula Kennedy with whom we first shared this idea, and subsequently Tomas Rene and Vicky Bates, who have taken the reins to guide us through the process And finally, we’re humbled by the enthusiasm and support of the anonymous readers of our draft material, whose faith in this project has given us the confidence to see it through Without them and without the valuable process of peer review, we are sure that this endeavour would have been far less rewarding and the result a very different book.

Fig 3.3 Writing together, example 2 Two separate pieces interspliced

Karen in bold, Dominic in regular text 68 Fig 6.1 Realms of spectator-participant engagement (Lavender,

Fig 9.1 The inverse S-curve of a typical crowdfunding model,

according to ordanini et al (2011) 248 Fig 9.2 Analysis of the overall investment path in four examples from

Crowdfunder campaigns, showing few trends and little

Fig 9.3 Correlation between number of backers (right-hand axis; line)

and amount received (left-hand axis, columns) across sample

of 43 theatre productions at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2017 255 Fig 9.4 Backers banded proportionately and indicating three clear

Fig 9.5 Backers banded proportionately and indicating an inverse

Fig 9.6 The cumulative emergence of Edinburgh Festival’s

list of tAbles

Table 7.1 Frequency analysis of selected vocabulary appearing in

YouTube viewer comments to Virtual Choirs 1–4 Data

Table 9.1 Crowdfunding platforms used to fund 43 out of 200

Table 9.2 Statistics from sample survey of 43 theatre productions at

Table 9.3 Top ten largest donations by amount and proportion

It may seem strange to start a discussion on creative collaboration by talking about bee pollination, but that is what we are going to do Since the 1950s, and since the mid-1990s in particular, the UK’s bee popula-tion has been in decline, a predicament that is not wholly understood What is understood is the effect that the decline of bees will have on the economics of food production and the attendant cost of living

The service that bees provide in pollinating crops is something easily taken for granted Yet without the contribution of bees to this stage in the food production process, we would be in a very problematic posi-tion In order to produce crops without the assistance of bees, we would have to factor into the industrial production process the pollination of the crops ourselves one study assessing how much it would cost to pol-linate crops in the UK by human agency, paying the minimum wage to

an army of workers with paint brushes who would transfer pollen to the stamen of the crops by hand, estimates a figure of £1.8bn per annum ($2.5bn).1 In that scenario, a process that has been naturally provided by the humble worker bee becomes a considerable drain on the economy

In a similar US study, which calculates the total contribution of bees to US crop production at $16bn per annum, a total decline in the bee population would result in a third of the country’s produce disap-pearing and an estimated 746,640 jobs being lost.2 With these statistics, it’s evident that bees more than justify their existence and their reputa-tion as collaborative workers

honey-Introduction

© The Author(s) 2018

K Savage and D Symonds, Economies of Collaboration in Performance,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95210-9_1

our reason for starting this book with this example of the bees is to draw attention to “invisible” economics that have an impact on our lives

and our livelihood Here, the actual cost of groceries is shown to include

a significant input of labour time, even if (at present) we are saved this

burden in terms of money cost thanks to the industry of the bees When

we speak about economics, then, we are not talking explicitly about

money, but about actual cost, or the “real economy”: “the economy that

goes beyond what current and corporate levels of public accounting are able to record”.3

According to classical definitions of economics, the “invisible cost” is crucial; indeed, in his essay “That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen” (1850), the economist Frédéric Bastiat makes a point of recognis-ing the invisible cost For him, the “real” cost of an activity is not just

what is seen to be gained, but also the opportunity that on closer

inspec-tion is revealed to have been lost He explains how, in fixing a pane of glass that has been broken, a homeowner will benefit from the acquisi-

tion of a new window that his money has bought; the seen transaction But there is also an unseen cost: the cost of the pair of shoes on which

he could otherwise have spent the money if he hadn’t had to pay for the

window This is what is not seen; the invisible cost; or in classical terms,

what is called the “opportunity cost”

We’ve seen one gain and one loss due to invisible economics—the knock-on gain from the bees’ pollination and the knock-on loss from the broken window cost Another example will help to clarify this nuance and show how invisible economics might be put to good use If each adult of working age in the UK donated fifteen minutes a day of their take-home wage to charity—in other words, gave up the minor micro-economic cost of fifteen minutes of pay—it would raise £18.3bn per annum ($25.4bn), a significant macroeconomic benefit and, as it were,

a huge “opportunity gain”.4 This could fund the global management of malaria (an estimated $2.5bn per annum5), tuberculosis ($4.8bn6), water hygiene ($3bn) and sanitation (£13bn7) worldwide; this in turn would lessen the impact of diarrhoea, cholera and other water-borne diseases; and there would still be enough to pay for pollinating all those crops In other words, the opportunity cost of that fifteen minutes of work a day

is enormous; but turned on its head, the exponential good achieved from

a relatively insignificant outlay gives a clear example of how economics can be used to our advantage Furthermore, all of that money would not only be channelled towards good causes, but would also filter back

into the economy to be “used” again: it would create jobs, generate tax revenue, stimulate spending and put into the economy a wealth of fur-ther fifteen-minute charitable contributions and a considerably multiplied

actual profit.

This is in principle the way that both the tax system and the charitable sector work Although we are not going to be writing about either of these in our discussions, this book is going to explore invisible econom-ics in more detail In particular, it is going to explore the positive benefits

of what is not seen, “externalities” (as they are called) that fall outside of

common accounting practices and which contribute at little or no cost

to our economic benefit We are by no means the first scholars to tify “positive externalities”, nor the way in which collaborative practices maximise their gain; however, the particular focus of our book—the eco-nomics of artistic collaboration—is something that has not been viewed

iden-in these terms

This is a book about collaboration in the arts and specifically about the common assumption that working together produces something that

is “more than the sum of its parts”.8 This is an assumption articulated

by numerous contemporary commentators, though its origin is rooted

in the Ancient Greek notion of synergy Synergy literally translates as

“working together”, but also implies a production benefit in excess of what is put in Any number of fields of enquiry could be used to evi-dence the apparent synergies of working together,9 but for now let’s refer to the thoughts of the economist Karl Marx

It’s worth noting the significance Marx attributed to working together, or in his term, “co-operating”: “The sum total of the mechan-ical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from the social force that

is developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided tion”, he wrote; “Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one”.10 He cites

opera-as an example of this sort of collaborative efficiency the building of the pyramids, which could not have been achieved on anything like the scale

it was if it were not for cooperative work Granted, this was a cooperation that may have been coerced, and the slave relations of the society’s power structure may have been ethically problematic; nevertheless, this was a society that recognised the exponential gain achieved from co-labour

In the field of contemporary popular economics, the same principle lies

at the heart of Wikinomics, as Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams

observe: “the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad horizontal networks of participants can accomplish much more than one organization or one individual can acting alone”.11 Thus, the ideas of collaboration and synergy come to sit comfortably together

in both the classical and contemporary interpretations of economics.Indeed, according to the great twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes, the processes of synergy operate across entire economic

systems, such that what is gained in the whole is if not more, then at least different than the sum of its parts His “fallacy of composition” suggests

that what is true of a microeconomy (a “part”, at the local level) may not necessarily hold for a macroeconomy (the “whole”; the big picture) The synergy of bringing together individual elements of a system can lead

to what is known as “complementarity” (in which the value of the vidual parts is enhanced by virtue of their relationship) or “emergence” (in which a new entity is created from the fusion of the parts) one example of this in daily life is found in the making of bread, the end product of which is recognisably something different (“more”) than the sum of its constituent ingredients.12

indi-our aim in this book is not to bamboozle readers with complex nomic theory, as the terms “complementarity” and “emergence” might suggest, but rather to introduce some of the affordances of economics

eco-as they relate to the practices and productivity of collaboration We’ll

do this by framing our discussion in the light of recent and related cepts in economic thought—first, the ideas of Wikinomics,13 Cognitive Capitalism14 and Post-capitalism,15 and then the idea of Biopolitics.16

con-We’ll finally go on to consider a number of case studies from the arts which allow us to see variations of these principles—together with their economic gains—in action

Allegorical tales of emergence and complementarity abound in formative parables and literature, attesting to the dynamics of syn-ergy, especially in relation to collaborative acts one of our favour-

ites is the Dr Seuss children’s story Horton Hears a Who, in which the

caring elephant Horton saves a whole town of tiny people, the Whos that live on a small speck of dust Throughout the tale, Horton is rid-iculed by his community for protecting what to everyone else appears

to be simply a speck of dust Yet he is the only one in the forest who can hear the mayor of Whoville begging for assistance from the creatures

of the outside world Horton suggests that all the citizens of Whoville should get together and shout as loud as they can, so as to make their

plight known to the creatures who can’t see them But even shouting together, the Whos’ voices can’t be heard, until one small Who is dis-covered who hasn’t been joining in With little Jojo’s tiny voice added to the call, Horton’s friends in the forest realise there are people living on the speck of dust The collaboration between all the Whos (and Horton) has worked to save their community, but it is only the exponential effect

of the final voice being added that tips the balance In effect, one small voice has saved humanity, contributing a wholly disproportionate benefit

to the audio-economics of Whoville

We are driven by a sense of timeliness in using the metaphor of nomics throughout this book, given the poignancy of the term in relation to events since 2008 The worldwide recession has caused governments and communities to rethink their behaviour, reconcep-tualising working relationships in an age increasingly driven by global and online market forces As we will explore, alternative strategies of exchange, investment and even philanthropy have emerged in the wake

eco-of the financial crisis, causing the dynamics between individuals ing together to take on different, often more efficient economic nuances than the simple exchange of labour for money for goods: the Human Genome project has marshalled silos of public assistance to enable sci-entific advances that could not have been achieved from the labour of research teams working alone; Airbnb has revolutionised the tourist accommodation sector by using the network of the Internet to maxim-ise user efficiency; Uber has controversially offered a different economic model for taxi provision in major cities by decentralising the service pro-viders and turning to freelance operatives; and new types of encyclopae-dia offered by the creative commons of Wikipedia, free streaming music and video services through Spotify and YouTube, and free education modelled by MooCs and California’s “42” university have transformed the way we think about value and rights in the knowledge economy.The catalyst behind these momentous changes, most of which have taken place in the last twenty years, is what is variously called the

work-“collaborative commons”,17 or the “networked information omy”,18 a “technological, economic, and organizational transforma-tion that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice and productivity in the information society”.19 Forming the basis of several slightly distinct yet ultimately connected conceptualisations of the new order—“Wikinomics”, “Cognitive Capitalism”, “Post-capitalism” and

econ-“Biopolitics”—the combination of information technology, information

goods and collaborative production, suggests Paul Mason,20 has transformed the existing paradigm of neo-capitalism and is even now leading to what Jeremy Rifkin has called its “eclipse”.21 The result has been an unprecedented shift in the way that economics works: “deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing and acting globally”.22

We will explore in some depth the theories behind this paradigm shift

in the following chapter, since the change has been so significant—and

so trumpeted—that it cannot be ignored within our economics phor Still, we should reiterate the fact that this is not a book on eco-nomics per se (as many of those we reference are), but instead a book about how artistic collaborations work, using theories of economics to understand their efficacy We will observe a number of ways in which typical collaborative relationships work in artistic forms such as theatre, film, dance and music, and we will demonstrate how their affordances rehearse materially some of the abstract dynamics of economics More than this, we will suggest that many of these artistic collaborations have been ahead of the game in turning to collaborative economies far earlier and far more fundamentally than the systems of economic machinery—states, organisations, companies and global enterprise—which are only now responding to the lure of collaboration Surprisingly—though per-haps tellingly—the value of collaborative economics as evidenced in artistic forms like theatre-making, film-making and music has been over-looked, even as they stand as tried and tested models of what has now been discovered to be economic efficiency Though we all come rather late to the table in understanding this connection, we make the claim that there is much still to be learnt by economic commentators from the existent dynamics of collaborative economics that happen on a daily basis in the theatres, sound stages, rehearsal rooms and concert halls

meta-of the world Theirs is not (on the whole) a digital or technologically networked system, and nor does it necessarily influence or affect funda-mentally the micro- or macroeconomic system of any state, organisation, company or global enterprise, despite its stated contribution to the wider economy.23 But in positing and refining approaches to collaborative prac-tice that generate more than the sum of their component contributions, arts organisations and communities can teach us a great deal about the economies of collaboration

As it happens, economic metaphors have gained currency well beyond discussions of finance and money markets, especially in the arts: recent conferences and publications attest to this, including the Arts Council’s “Creative Economies” (2012), the University of Notre Dame’s “Paying the Piper: The Economies of Amateur Performance” (2014), Royal Holloway’s “Dancing Economies: Currency, Value and

Labour” (2015) and special issues of Performance Research entitled

“on Labour and Performance” (2012) and “on Value” (2013), both

of which have brought some very explicit discussions of economics to the idea of performance Elsewhere, other publications have turned the tables to use metaphors of theatre in relation to the economy: in evoking their concept of the “Experience Economy” (1999), Pine and Gilmore suggest that “Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage”, their con-tention being that consumers will pay extra for experiences staged to promise greater cultural value; meanwhile, Wickstrom (2006) talks of

“Performing Consumers” and of global capital’s “Theatrical Seductions”

in the money markets of Broadway and Las Vegas Now, most of these uses of economics terminology remind us that the diverse arts have industries of their own, though those industries are not what we are assessing in this book Nevertheless, collaboration is everywhere: a fasci-nating partnership between ideas from the arts and economics

our particular slant on how the arts work as an economy is to explore the synergies of creative collaboration In this, we are guided by our own experiences as collaborators on creative projects, so our perspective embarks from our understandings of specific collaborative arts (perfor-mance, theatre, film, music) Economics is, after all, a social act; a pro-cess that can and does only happen within a society and between players

in that (creative) space, as Geoff Hodgson explains: “productive ity in a society necessarily involves social relations between persons”, he writes,24 and he quotes Karl Marx on the point: “in production, men not only act on nature but on one another […] In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place”.25 other writers concur: David P Levine refers to “relations of mutual dependence among members of

activ-a sociactiv-al division” activ-and considers our identity within this economy to be established “not as the individual but as the collectivity”.26 Meanwhile, Robert Frank puts it more bluntly, reminding us that markets “harness

individual self-interest to produce the greatest good for society as a whole”.27 In short, economics is a particularly appropriate lens through which to consider collaboration due to a procession of intrinsically col-laborative affordances that have guided first the cumulative productivity

of mass labour, then the collegiate admonition of Gramscian consent and finally the mutual sociality of what Hardt and Negri call “biopolitics”— all precursors to the Wikinomics, Cognitive Capitalism and Post-capitalism that is now arising All of these are areas we will discuss in due course As Robin DeRieux writes, “From democracy to revolution, just about every aspect of society requires cooperation with other people”.28

First, though, it is worthwhile considering what we mean when we use the term “collaboration”, in itself rather a catch-all term carrying with it connotations of cooperation, collectivity and community

collAborAtion As cooperAtiVitY, collectiVism

And communAlitYBeing “in” collaboration is a state which is hard to qualify, and the dynamics that emerge from the juxtaposition, clash or flow between dif-ferent contributions can be likewise hard to identify We often talk about collaboration loosely, yet it’s clear there must be differences between dif-ferent types of collaboration Consider three of these

First, Cambridge University and the pharmaceuticals giants AstraZeneca and MedImmune announced a collaboration in 2014 to develop new scientific research Their projects included a new Ph.D programme in biomedical research; an exchange of expertise in neuro-science research; access for university researchers to AstraZeneca’s pipe-line compounds; and an “Entrepreneur-in-Residence” programme based

at the university The initiative as a whole builds on existing tions in the field of oncology and has been assisted by the relocation of AstraZeneca’s global headquarters to Cambridge In press releases, rep-resentatives talk of this as a “strategic initiative” in “a world where part-nerships and collaborations drive medical innovation” It’s hard to deny the justification for sharing knowledge and expertise in the pursuit of fighting disease, and it’s clear to see how a collaboration of sorts is going

collabora-on in terms of sharing resources, exchanging knowledge and embedding the work of each partner within a “truly world class environment” To these organisations, this is clearly what collaboration means.29

Second, compare this to the proposed collaboration between Indian political parties Shiv Sena and the NCP in their alliance against the ruling BJP, which fell through in 2014 Aiming to become a part of some coali-tion power bloc in India’s elections, the National Congress Party repeat-edly sought a joint agreement—either to prevent other parties seizing power or to claim power of their own—variously calling this a collabo-ration or an alliance, but showing little meaningful collaborative strategy beyond political sloganeering Is this—a collaboration in name only that may or may not eventually come to pass—what collaboration means?30

Third, what about the creative collaboration between performance artist Jennifer Rubell and portrait artist Brandi Twilley that created the fictitious painter Brad Jones in 2013? “The initial idea for the project?”,

writes Alanna Martinez in The Observer:

To find male painters who would paint Ms Rubell in the nude for set durations of time Instead, she was blown away by the work of Brandi Twilley, who […] was hired for the job, and entered into a contract with

Ms Rubell to paint nude portraits of the artist three times a week, for sions lasting several hours—even punching time cards to document the work But somewhere along the way the project shifted, and the relation- ship between the two women and the work they were making together began to be undeniably a collaboration and not just work-for-hire 31

ses-Twilley and Rubell worked together in this way for two different series

of paintings throughout 2014–2015, creating an oeuvre of work with one participant as model and the other as painter, and then exploiting the unusual set-up of their work to stage critical discussions of the male gaze They certainly worked together and created something—a set of things—through their partnership Was this a collaboration, though, and is it the same sort of collaboration as those we have encountered between AstraZeneca/Cambridge and NCP/Shiv Sena?

Each of these has been projected in the media as a collaboration, but the differences between these partnerships in terms of scale, discipline, process, intention and output make it challenging to see them all as examples of the same working practice The aim of this book is to try better to understand collaborative processes and how these vary; how we might explain or disseminate the dynamics of collaborative processes to others in a way that is useful for those beginning to collaborate What, then, are the expectations of collaboration?

The term “collaboration” in its most common usage simply refers to the activity of a number of people working together towards a common goal That goal might be the running of a project, the exploration of an idea or the managing of a country; in working together to achieve these ends, any individuals involved are, in effect, collaborating We might embellish the term by associating it with ideas of partnership, discussion and shared practice, and we might pick up on the idea of the “common goal” to link the term with the notion behind a “commons”, something that belongs to no one and therefore to everyone All of these ideas sug-gest collaboration to be a worthy and rewarding practice and suggest that the outcomes of such practice will necessarily be beneficial at least in terms of productivity or ethical reward, regardless of whether or not the result appears to be “more than the sum of its parts”.

Inevitably, though, the way in which such collaboration works—if it

is going to be mutually beneficial—needs to be carefully managed; sions need to be agreed upon; and the objectives of the project need to

deci-be shared In this sense, collaboration is an intensely political activity, and

it is therefore not surprising that we can learn a lot about collaboration from considering various political notions of democracy, community and voice

the nineteenth-centurY emergence of collAborAtion

As A politicAl Act

A real groundswell in collaborative politics began to emerge during the nineteenth century as part of the widespread dissatisfaction of cit-izens in various countries with their leaders Through joining together

as communities and voicing their shared ideals, specific interest groups campaigned for their democratic right to be heard The backdrop of uprisings in mid-nineteenth-century Europe—part of a long process of both industrial and social revolutions—inspired political thinkers of the time like Frenchmen Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Charles Gide (1847–1932), Germans Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), and Russians Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Though their political preferences were subtly different, the shared principle these commentators all espoused for society was defined by a governance of and by the people rather than by means of state control Their stand against the state often caused them to

be labelled “anarchists”—a term that has subsequently taken on a rather different nuance of lawlessness; yet their commitment was very much

to lawful, organised alternatives to the existing structures In seeking

to replace hierarchical systems of power with alternative strategies, they would suggest “communality” (anarcho-communism), “collectivism” (anarcho-collectivism) and “co-operativity” as new possibilities for social organisation, each reflecting ideas about democratic rights, in particular freedom, ownership, labour and social responsibility In subtly different ways, each of these approaches would idealise collaborative authority Communality (according to Kropotkin) insisted that individuals’ roles should be defined by the needs of the whole and should serve the mis-sion of the commune; in its most austere economic mode, contributors would input energy to the commune and benefits would then be distrib-uted back to individuals “to each according to his needs” Collectivism (following Bakunin) embraced the individual contributions of members and shaped the identity of the group from the dynamics of those contri-butions; economically, this model rewarded individual input with a sort

of pro rata distribution, “to each according to his labor” Finally, the system of cooperativity offered a means of pooling resources; from the cumulative wealth of the cooperative group, benefits could then be dis-tributed on a basis of need From this stemmed the nineteenth-century ideal of mutual aid (Proudhon) and systems which have ultimately con-tributed to the sort of liberal democracies existing today in the West.Although each of these systems eschewed what they saw as the state’s sometimes patronising determination of a “social common” (that which benefitted society as a whole), nonetheless within all of these arrange-ments existed a new model for determining, adopting and promoting the idea of a shared common good In some contexts (communism), this became the driving force guiding the behaviour of all contributors to the wider group; in others, the common goal was itself set by the individuals’ combined requirements (collectivism); elsewhere, the social common was elected by mutual consent (cooperativity)

Although other terms have been used historically to conceptualise the organisation of groups working together politically, we are particularly interested in this introduction in expanding on the terms “communal-ity”, “collectivism” and “co-operativity”, since these rather than oth-ers (“alliance”, “unity” and “coalition”) have become used widely to establish structures and working practices in the arts Later in the book,

we will consider alternative terms, metaphors and labels—and we will structure our case study chapters around five of these: “network”, “audi-ence”, “host”, “swarm” and “crowd”.

cooperAtiVitYThe idea of the “co-operative” as a business model arose from the suc-cess of the associated mutual aid programs of the nineteenth century These were intended to provide welfare for the poor, sick and needy, from contributions made by more prosperous individuals By the late nineteenth century, the realisation that mutual benefit could be gained

by individuals clubbing together to purchase commodities wholesale and therefore more cheaply informed the development of cooperative groups throughout Europe and America Championed by the coopera-tive economists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Gide, and best rep-resented by organisations such as the British Co-operative Society, which has rolled out this business model to services as diverse as banking and undertaking, the driver of this sort of arrangement was one of economies

of scale The more individuals pooled resources, the more they could own the means of production and thereby benefit from efficiencies in the system Joseph Heath identifies five “fundamentally different mech-anisms of cooperative benefit”,32 each of which is still widely operational today: “Economies of scale” (underlining the operational logic of cor-porations), “Gains from trade” (which forms the basis of stock markets),

“Risk-pooling” (which underpins the insurance industry), “Self-binding” (the philosophical driver behind the helping professions) and “informa-tion transmission” (which guides the ethos of the media) Heath’s anal-ysis offers a useful reminder that organisations or individuals enter into cooperative practices in order to gain net efficiencies and that in this sense the transactions they undertake are intrinsically economic To pool resources, goes the logic, is in some way beneficial to the individual sub-scribers to the cooperative one benefits, so to speak, from the “more” generated from “the sum of the parts”

If cooperativity relied on mutual democracy, collectivism and munality were two sides of a slightly different coin, both invoking the political ideas of social communism, though conceptualising it in rather different ways

com-collectiVismChampioned by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakunin in opposition to Marxism, collectivism mistrusted any form of individual empowerment, preferring instead to see authority handled collectively by all participants

in the group The ownership of this power was, effectively, joint stock (and this became the name of perhaps the most celebrated UK theatre collective) The principles guiding Bakunin’s spirit of collectivism are commonly recognised as those of “Liberty” (in which all people have the freedom to exercise their own will); “Socialism” (in which ownership and benefits are equally available to all); “Federalism” (in which relationships are guided by free association and federation); “Anti-theologism” (dis-missing symbolic as well as ruling higher authorities); and “Materialism” (following Marx, suggesting that people and nature are determined by their material existence) “In a word, we reject all legislation, all author-ity, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of

the immense majority in subjection to them”, wrote Bakunin in God and the State (1882).33 Such leaderless utopianism, of course, proves to be an almost impossible goal, since the organisation of groups needs elements

of leadership, spokesmanship and representation Nevertheless, scale collective enterprises such as the European Union, NATo and the United Nations are good examples of Bakunin-styled collectivism, tend-ing towards federalism, and perhaps the most contemporary libertarian practice These are guided not so much by doctrinaire or administrative management, but by moralistic and ethical self-regulation, as Bechtel suggests: “Authority wasn’t eliminated so much as it was decentralized

large-At the same time, and perhaps more important, it was exercised ethically

If, as it appears, the politics of pure collectivity is unrealizable, ethics becomes a powerful compensation”.34

communAlitYCommunality, meanwhile, stems not so much from the political ideal

of communism (though there are types of commune informed by that politics, such as the Paris Commune), but from groups wishing to self-consciously distance themselves from the bureaucracy of life For these

groups, writes Ron E Roberts, their worldview was based on three main premises: “egalitarianism” (in which everyone is considered an equal);

“human scale” (demanding close-knit and personal ties between bers rather than mass social set-ups); and “anti-bureaucracy” (eschewing the petty politics of state-organised existence).35 Bill Metcalf expanded

mem-this description in his book Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living Around the Globe (1996), noting the importance of the group in shared

living arrangements; the operation of a collective household with shared finances; group decision-making; and a close-knit intimacy between mem-bers The subtle changes in terminology employed in this context gesture towards a humanitarian rather than political influence being developed: originally referred to as “communist and socialist settlements”, then “com-munitarian” societies and then “intentional communities”, the idea of

community rather than communism weights the principles of communes

towards the social rather than the reactionary “The real attraction to a community is relevance to conversations that show the ‘thoughts’ of the people and not the thoughts of the ‘brand or organisation’”, suggests Jay Deragon.36 Nevertheless, free-thinking and libertarian though these groups may be, their standards and codes of living are still informed by politics—the sort of politics that rejects state control and values the inde-pendence of common people Thus by the 1960s, writes Lee Tusman in

his book Really Free Culture (a book created from articles collated from

the cultural commons), “almost any counter-cultural, rural, intentional community was called a commune”.37

If these subtly different approaches to group organisation flag up the slippery and sometimes blurred ways in which these terms have been put to use with differing ideological and political connotations, it points to the uncertain language that reflects different ideas of working together in different activities and with different goals Collaboration

is just one term, rubbing shoulders with (and often being used ymously with) others like cooperation, communality and collectivism Performance scholar Rudi Laermans has described the aims of each of

synon-these organisational strategies as “the politics of communalism”: “the

furthering of ‘the commons’ through a common decision-making”,38

though in preference to defining these arrangements within one ching term, she has suggested alternative terminology to nuance modes

overar-of collaboration one such term is her interesting conceptualisation overar-of

“co-opetition”: “the unity of the difference between harmonious eration and inharmonious competition”39; a perspective that reveals both

coop-the collaboration and coop-the friction inherent in bringing different people together in working relationships with “common” goals Elsewhere, linguistics scholar olga Kozar makes a useful distinction which defines collaboration in relation to cooperation: “cooperation can be achieved if all participants do their assigned parts separately and bring their results

to the table; collaboration, in contrast, implies direct interaction among individuals to produce a product and involves negotiations, discussions, and accommodating others’ perspectives”.40 In this, the mutuality of the cooperative agenda seeps into the very activity at the heart of the collab-orative dynamic Where cooperativity offers a functional framework, it is through collaboration that the active energy of the encounter can take place Rather curiously, collaboration is the one term that political movements have seemed uneasy to employ

Still, it’s a term that has been used in a number of recent

publica-tions focussing on artistic creation: R Keith Sawyer’s Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration (2003), and Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (2007) both stem from his work on improvisa-

tion and creativity and explore the spontaneous energies and emergent dynamics of collaboration in live, improvised encounters Vera John-

Steiner’s Creative Collaborations (2000) considers a number of

signifi-cant twentieth-century collaborations in various fields that have been influential in developing knowledge: the relationship between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr is one of her case studies, others of which include Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine Dorothy Miell

and Karen Littleton’s Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives

(2004) is an edited collection taking a sociocultural approach to the theme of collaboration and focussing on the cultural, institutional and interpersonal contexts that nurture practices of working together, while

Paul B Paulus and Bernard A Nijstad’s collection Group Creativity: Innovation through Collaboration (2003) draws its perspective from psy- chology and cognitive understanding Robert Cohen’s Working Together

in Theatre: Collaboration and Leadership (2011) brings a very practical

understanding drawn from the author’s career in theatre Perhaps the most thorough exploration of recent years, though, leans not on the term “collaboration”, but instead on the idea of “collective creation” In

their trilogy, A History of Collective Creation (2013), Collective Creation

in Contemporary Performance (2013) and Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance (2016), the editors Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

and Scott Proudfit chart a course through more or less a hundred years

of “collective creation” that they see occurring in three distinct but lapping waves, defined broadly as the first half of the twentieth century, the mid-1950s to the 1980s, and the 1980s to the present This allows

over-us to see the development of collaborative practices in the arts against the backdrop of a socioculturally and politically defined landscape; in this context, the economic and political energies of working together spring particularly to light

Twentieth-century group-based arts practices have adopted each of the terms we have been exploring and each of their ideological ways of working, as the artists’ communes of the 1880s, the film-makers’ coop-eratives of the 1960s and the performance-based collectives of the new millennium attest The word “commune” has increasingly received bad press as shared principles have at times been hijacked by cultish leaders and a quasi-religious or spiritual philosophy Meanwhile, cooperatives have been making a comeback, with the Internet creating opportuni-ties for individuals from diverse locations to be able to work together Very often the cooperative is used as an organising principle to enable young artists to make contacts, network and develop opportunities; both the fine arts and performance arenas in Britain use the idea of

“co-operative agencies” as business frameworks to develop career egies Meanwhile, in performance collectives like Forced Entertainment

strat-or Gob Squad, membership is fluid and evolving, and the identities of individuals are defined by tasks or skills which they bring to the whole There are stable factors, to be sure, driven by the ethos, manifesto or even just the name, but the core team may change over time, and there exists an element of freedom within collectivism that enables the indi-vidual to move in and out of participation Guided by notions of equal-ity, solidarity and self-responsibility, it might be said that there is little distinguishing the contemporary arts cooperative from the contemporary arts collective, except for the fact that the cooperatives tend to cater for the managerial needs of emerging artists’ careers, while a central mission statement by the collective determines in a far more focused way the content or project-based activities of a group

This book is not a handbook or “how to” guide about tion; that is, a field well covered Instead, it is a book exploring prac-tices of collaboration through the theoretical prism of economics It does not seek answers as such, but instead seeks to lay a foundation of critical thinking about economies of collaboration in performance

collabora-our aim is to generate insight, provoke thought and engender further dialogue, enabling discourse and practice to develop which may in turn create emergent knowledge.

The book is organised into two sections The first section engages with theories of economics, collaboration and political thought Chapter 2 presents some basic economic theory, first establishing what the term “economics” means to different thinkers We rehearse some of the tenets of economic thought, before turning specifically to the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes in understanding the distinction between micro- and macroeconomics We note some of the dynamics of “invisible economics”, picking up in particular on the ideas

of cooperation, the invisible hand and externalities Finally, we go on to

explore three newer conceptions of economics, Wikinomics, Cognitive Capitalism and Post-capitalism, observing how recent developments in technology, attitudes to information exchange and the ability to network ever more widely have caused a fundamental shift in our mindset

Chapter 3 explores the notion of working together and looks at some

of the many contemporary theories relating to collaboration First, we consider some of the language that is used to conceptualise collabora-tion, noting in particular three metaphors that have common currency: the idea that working together is like playing in an orchestra or ensem-ble; the etymological idea that collaboration implies “co-labour”; and the idea that singular individuals in collaboration become “we” We exper-iment with a number of strategies for inhabiting that identity ourselves

in our writing, and this causes us to recognise some of the differences

in our thinking that enable us to complement each other Among other writers, we turn specifically to the work of R Keith Sawyer and Vera John-Steiner, who have extensively mapped effective processes for collab-oration We consider some of the conditions in which collaboration takes place, some of the structures which enable it to operate and some of the benefits that emerge from the collaborative process

In Chapter 4, we turn exclusively to the work of Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri, whose series of books Empire (2000), Multitude (2004),

Common Wealth (2011), Declaration (2012) and Assembly (2017) lishes an important contemporary field of thought They note that the globalised world has become locked into a condition of oppression; they argue that the only way out of this condition is to empower individu-als to work within a group But instead of coalescing as a mass (“the people”), Hardt and Negri encourage us to tap into the productive

estab-“biopolitics” of our community (“the multitude”) Their argument

is sustained throughout this series of books, allowing it to become the most robust articulation of a new, collaborative, economic future With echoes of the three main contemporary ideas we introduced in Chapter 2

(Wikinomics, Cognitive Capitalism and Post-capitalism), this material serves well as the conclusion to the first section of our book, discuss-ing the theoretical frameworks that surround the idea of a collaborative economy

The second section of the book turns to a number of case studies

of artistic practice that, we think, bring these theoretical thoughts into relief Each chapter in this section frames its discussion around a particu-lar term In Chapter 5, “Network”, we consider the Internet platform Craigslist as an example of a wiki set-up We focus on the documentary

film Craigslist Joe (2012) and a small-scale theatre piece Five Encounters

on a Site called Craigslist (2017) to discuss its economics in action

In the film, Joe Garner spends a month surviving on handouts from Craigslist, travelling extensively throughout the USA and enjoying activ-ities and experiences provided by this collaborative economy Meanwhile,

in the theatre piece, performer Sam Ward recounts his experiences ing a range of strangers through the dating pages of the site The trans-actions here are clear exchange agreements made between members of the network for reciprocal gain What both the film and the theatre piece create, however, is a type of artwork that itself begins to mimic a wiki phenomenon We become aware that the apparently solo story of both pieces is in fact constructed as a narrative and a piece of art by prosum-ers, adding an additional layer to the collaborative economy This enables

meet-us to introduce ideas of participatory practice into our discmeet-ussion, which are developed throughout the next chapter

In Chapter 6, “Audience”, we explore the shift that has happened

in the relationship between artists and their audiences We respond to Nicholas Bourriaud’s discussion of “relational aesthetics” in the field of live art in the 1990s, which sets up not only the artistic work of crea-tion but also the emergent dynamics of reception as generative in the collaborative act our discussion considers the increasing emergence of audience participation, immersion and interactivity in contemporary per-formance practices, considering the collaboration of audiences and spec-

tators in the creative act and focussing on Gob Squad’s Western Society (Nottingham, 2014) and Dries Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land (Athens,

2014) This leads us to theorise a number of roles that spectators

adopt in participatory performance which contribute to the economics

of the encounter In the case of certain contributions, we recognise an

“unknowing collaborator”, whose input reflects the exogenous gain of something outside the system

Chapter 7, “Host”, begins with a consideration of the dawn chorus

as an unintentional collaborative phenomenon Birds who happen to be gathered in the same place and at the same time chirp all together, and

we perceive the cumulative effect as reminiscent of a choral sound We hear how this has inspired composer Pete Wyer to create musical events that experiment through technology with ideas of time and space; we hear how both he and fellow composer Eric Whitacre create perfor-mances using musicians who are scattered around the globe Using a concept called “Time Structured Mapping”, Wyer creates “Simultaneity Projects” with musicians in different countries Meanwhile, using the wiki facility of the Internet to enable contributors to upload individual video files, Whitacre collates hundreds of clips together to create his

“Virtual Choirs” Performing individually and from their dispersed tions, the individuals come together in these collaborations to astonish-ing creative effect our discussion considers both the artworks and the ensuing social media activity generated in Internet chat Through a close reading of the comments, we establish how individuals engaging as both performers and audiences benefit from the “togetherness” that even these dispersed activities imply

loca-Chapter 8, “Swarm”, conceptualises the physical flocking of uals into a group as an aesthetic collaboration, in both nature and art

individ-We consider some of the ways in which the idea of the swarm has been discussed, exploring three approaches to its study First, we look at the idea of “swarm intelligence”, which has been led by biologists to under-stand how birds flock together in flight and used by computer scientists

to mimic that behaviour in gaming animations Next, we turn to the idea

of the swarm as a metaphor, picking up on a suggestion from marketing economists that relates to crowdfunding Finally, we consider the persis-tent fascination choreographers have shown for the swarm as a dynamic and emergent aesthetic in their work We look in particular at Merce

Cunningham’s Beach Birds (1991), Princeton University’s research experiment Flock Logic (2011) and Turner Prize nominee Tino Seghal’s These Associations (2012).

our final chapter turns to the performance ecology of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Here, we consider the recent collaborative phenomenon

of crowdfunding as a way to support small-scale theatre We duct a sample analysis of the 2017 Fringe Festival, exploring how far the dynamics of crowdfunding and collaboration contribute to small-scale companies, fringe venues and the Edinburgh Festival as a whole Although we identify limitations in the effectiveness of this funding mechanism as a resource, we establish that the festival itself is a phenom-enon entirely driven by the collaborative economy.

con-In pitching this book as a sort of manifesto, our intention is to raise awareness of some of the “invisible” economics that go unrecognised, seeing in these the most profitable hideaways and alcoves in which cre-ativity might occur We want to embrace the economies of exponential increase, creative excess and unacknowledged downtime, and we see the ability to tap into these as being enabled through the collaborative encounter We can be more creative and productive in our handling of creative economies, recognising undefined activity and clarifying the value of the apparently “invisible”; we can rethink the resources within our collaborative ecology, whether these be human, conceptual or tech-nological Perhaps most significantly, we see the most profitable use of these emergences as being activated through the playful logic of crea-tive thinking, the sort of mindset that characterises those who practice in the arts, especially when they practice dynamically through spontaneity, improvisation and live interplay In this, the arts can go a long way to contribute to the macroeconomics of a healthy nation

notes

1 Tom D Breeze, Stuart P M Roberts, and Simon G Pots (2012), The Decline of England’s Bees: Policy Review and Recommendations, Reading:

University of Reading and Friends of the Earth, p 6.

2 “If Honeybees Become Extinct” (2016), Save on Energy website, https:// www.saveonenergy.com/honeybees-become-extinct/ Accessed 30 March

2018 “Based on USDA Crop Values 2015 Summary” (2016), United States

viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1050 Accessed 30 March 2018; Roger A Morse and Nicholas W Calderone (2000), “The Value of

Honeybees as Pollinators of US Crops in 2000”, Bee Culture 128: 15.

3 Yann Moulier Boutang (2011), Cognitive Capitalism, trans Ed Emery,

Cambridge and Malden, MA, p 181.

4 Assuming a population of 60m with 60% at working age, and a minimum wage rate of £7.83ph.

5 World Health organization (2015), “Fact Sheet: World Malaria Report

2015”, World Health Organization website, 9 December, http://www who.int/malaria/media/world-malaria-report-2015/en/ Accessed 12 March 2018.

6 World Health organization (2012), “Global Tuberculosis Report 2012”, Geneva: World Health organization, http://www.who.int/tb/publica- tions/global_report/gtbr12_main.pdf Accessed 12 March 2018.

7 “The global recurrent costs, including those incurred by operation and maintenance, are estimated at US$ 13 billion for sanitation and US$

3 billion for water, over the period 2010–2015” Guy Hutton (2012),

Global Costs and Benefits of Drinking-Water Supply and Sanitation Interventions to Reach the MDG Target and Universal Coverage, Geneva:

World Health organization, p 6.

8 A direct translation from Book VIII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is difficult to

establish, though the phrase has been frequently and idiomatically taken

to suggest that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” Thomas Taylor’s 1801 translation interprets it as “The Whole Is Not as It Were

a Heap, but Is Something Besides the Parts”, London: Davis, Wilks and Taylor, p 199.

9 A quick Google search will reveal scholarly articles invoking this concept

in relation to any number of different fields of study, from management

to urban design, and from chemical engineering to artificial intelligence.

10 Karl Marx (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1,

Mill (1872), A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, London:

John W Parker and Son, p 371.

13 Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams (2008), Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything [expanded edition], London: Atlantic Books; Tapscott and Williams, Macrowikinomics.

14 Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism.

15 Paul Mason (2016), PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London:

Penguin Books.

16 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA

and London: Harvard University Press; Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire,

London, New York and Toronto: Penguin Books; Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri (2011), Common Wealth, Cambridge, MA and London:

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri (2012), Declaration, New York: Argo Navis; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017), Assembly, New York and London:

oxford University Press.

17 Jeremy Rifkin (2014), The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, p 2.

18 Benkler, Yochai (2006), The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, p 3.

19 Benkler, Wealth of Networks, p 27.

20 Mason, PostCapitalism, p xv.

21 Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost.

22 Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics, p 3.

23 The UK government announced in November 2017 that the combined creative industries of “advertising and marketing, arts and film, TV and radio, and museums and galleries” accounted for 5% of national GVA, some £92bn in 2016 Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport (2017), “Creative Industries’ Record Contribution to UK Economy:

£92bn Sector Growing at Twice the Rate of the Economy”, 29 November,

bution-to-uk-economy Accessed 12 March 2018.

24 Geoff Hodgson (2009), “Persuasion, Expectations and the Limits

to Keynes”, in Tony Lawson and Hashem Pesaran (2009), Keynes’ Economics: Methodological Issues, Abingdon: Routledge, p 24.

25 Hodgson, “Persuasion”, p 24, quoting Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p 211.

26 David P Levine (1977), Economic Studies: Contributions to the Critique of Economic Theory, London: Routledge, p 5.

27 Robert H Frank (2011), The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition and the Common Good, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p 7.

28 Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede (1990), Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Carbondale and Edwardsville:

Southern Illinois University Press, p 128, quoting Robin DeRieux,

Brewing Up a Great Group Project.

29 Matthew Gooding (2014), “Astrazeneca and Medimmune Announce

New Collaboration with Cambridge University”, The Cambridge

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/AstraZeneca-MedImmune-announce-new-collaboration/story-23202293-detail/ story.html#ixzz3GNUCUo4g Accessed 17 october 2014; Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice President of Innovative Medicines & Early Development, AstraZeneca Cited in Anon (2014), “AstraZeneca and

University of Cambridge Strengthen Long-Standing Partnership”,

https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/astra- ship Accessed 21 February 2017.

30 Rohit Chandvarkar (2014), “Will NCP Collaborate with Shiv Sena in

Maharashtra to Build an Anti-BJP Alliance?”, The Economic Times, 17

october, tion/will-ncp-collaborate-with-shiv-sena-in-maharashtra-to-build-an- anti-bjp-alliance/articleshow/44843641.cms Accessed 17 october 2014; PTI (2017), “UP Elections: NCP Says It Will Seek Alliance if SP, Congress, RLD Come Together”, http://www.hindustantimes.com/ india-news/up-elections-ncp-says-it-will-seek-alliance-if-sp-congress-rld- come-together/story-9NnbwS26kH5bpFMYX2074o.html Accessed

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-na-21 February 2017 Similar collaborations have marked UK politics in recent years, first in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition from

2010 to 2015, and latterly in the Conservative/DUP agreement from

2017 Meanwhile, a mandatory coalition between principle parties— known as the Northern Ireland power sharing agreement—is in effect

in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the region’s devolved administrative government.

31 Alanna Martinez (2014), “‘Who Is Brad Jones?’ Jennifer Rubell and

Brandi Twilley Talk About Their Collaboration”, New York Observer, 16

october, bell-and-brandi-twilley-talk-about-their-collaboration/#ixzz3GNUaT- PEv Accessed 17 october 2014.

32 Joseph Heath (2006), “The Benefits of Cooperation”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 34: 4, pp 313–351, 336.

33 Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (2017), God and the State, Newton

Stewart: Anodos Books, p 23.

34 Roger Bechtel (2013), “The Playwright and the Collective: Drama and Politics in British Devised Theatre”, in Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva

and Scott Proudfit (eds) (2013), Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 39–50, 49.

35 Lee Tusman (ed.) (n.d.), Really Free Culture: Anarchist Communities, Radical Movements and Public Practices, PediaPress, p 6.

36 Jay Deragon (2010), “From Communities to Communes”, The

munes/ Accessed 18 August 2014.

www.relationship-economy.com/2010/08/from-communities-to-com-37 Tusman, Really Free Culture, p 6.

38 Rudi Laermans (2012), “‘Being in Common’: Theorizing Artistic

Collaboration”, Performance Research 17: 6, pp 94–102, 101.

39 Laermans, “Being in Common”, p 98.

40 olga Kozar (2010), “Towards Better Group Work: Seeing the Difference

Between Cooperation and Collaboration”, English Teaching Forum 2,

Boutang, Yann Moulier (2011), Cognitive Capitalism (trans Ed Emery),

Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Breeze, Tom D., Stuart P M Roberts, and Simon G Pots (2012), The Decline

of England’s Bees: Policy Review and Recommendations, Reading: University of

Reading and Friends of the Earth.

Deragon, Jay (2010), “From Communities to Communes”, The Relationship

http://www.relationship-econ-omy.com/2010/08/from-communities-to-communes/ Accessed 18 August 2014.

Frank, Robert H (2011), The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition and the Common Good, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA and

London: Harvard University Press.

——— (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London,

New York and Toronto: Penguin Books.

——— (2011), Common Wealth, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press.

——— (2012), Declaration, New York: Argo Navis.

——— (2017), Assembly, New York and London: oxford University Press Heath, Joseph (2006), “The Benefits of Cooperation”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 34: 4, pp 313–351.

Hutton, Guy (2012), Global Costs and Benefits of Drinking-Water Supply and Sanitation Interventions to Reach the MDG Target and Universal Coverage,

Geneva: World Health organization.

Kozar, olga (2010), “Towards Better Group Work: Seeing the Difference

Between Cooperation and Collaboration”, English Teaching Forum 2,

pp 16–23.

Laermans, Rudi (2012), “‘Being in Common’: Theorizing Artistic

Collaboration”, Performance Research 17: 6, pp 94–102.

Lawson, Tony, and Hashem Pesaran (2009), Keynes’ Economics: Methodological Issues, Abingdon: Routledge.

Levine, David P (1977), Economic Studies: Contributions to the Critique of Economic Theory, London: Routledge.

Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede (1990), Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern

Illinois University Press.

Marx, Karl (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1,

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mason, Paul (2016), PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London: Penguin

Books.

Mill, John Stuart (1872), A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive,

London: John W Parker and Son.

Morse, Roger A., and Nicholas W Calderone (2000), “The Value of Honeybees

as Pollinators of US Crops in 2000”, Bee Culture 128, pp 1–15.

Rifkin, Jeremy (2014), The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, New York: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos and Scott Proudfit (eds) (2013), Collective Creation

in Contemporary Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D Williams (2008), Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything [expanded edition], London: Atlantic

of an efficient economic system.

Mandeville’s allegory of the beehive offers us the initial picture

of a small society that is prosperous and thriving, “a paradice” [sic] that is “th’Esteem of Foreigners”, and in which even “the worst of all the Multitude/Did something for the Common Good”.1 By working together, the bees prosper: “the very Poor Lived better than the Rich before”, Mandeville tells us; “And nothing could be added more” Yet all is not perfect, for within each sphere of life and each sector of the community is an element of discontent: the judiciary, we gather, is eas-ily bribed; the military honours its heroes but removes any objectors by firing squad; the rich enjoy lives of plenty, while the poor struggle; and the bees in general trade in corruption, vice and fraud Hearing so many complaints about this, Jove resolves to stamp out the corruption Yet the result is to spell disaster for the hive: “In half an Hour, the Nation round”, we are told, “Meat fell a Penny in the Pound” With no more crime, the lawyers and judges swiftly find themselves out of work, bail-iffs have no more debt to collect, and gradually the economy grinds to

a halt With no one in jail, the prison officers and locksmiths find their work drying up; families stop spending beyond their means, so traders and shopkeepers go out of business Eventually, so many leave the hive

Economics

© The Author(s) 2018

K Savage and D Symonds, Economies of Collaboration in Performance,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95210-9_2

to find prosperity elsewhere that the only ones left are the utterly pure

in heart In the final satirical twist, even they begin to feel guilty about being so pure: “to avoid Extravagance” the final few leave too; “They flew into a hollow tree, Blest with content and Honesty” Society has been destroyed: the healthy whole has been undone

The Fable of the Bees is a witty analysis of how a thriving economy

relies on the workings of its parts, and a reminder that it is the ics between those parts—the opportunities created by each individual enterprise—that create further opportunities and drive the motility of the whole It’s an early statement about economics, a precursor to sub-sequent writings by some of the biggest names in economics: people like Adam Smith (1723–1790), Karl Marx (1818–1883) and John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)

dynam-so, whAt is economics?

In principle, there is no right or wrong way to organise the flow of actions between one party and another, and there are many possible approaches to conducting such human behaviour At a basic level, sim-ple transactions could barter one commodity for another or one service for another: I provide a barrel of oil to you in return for a cow from your herd, quid pro quo; my neighbour may help me chop down a tree

trans-in return for me helptrans-ing to put up his barn In a more expanded munity, these exchanges may work to provide all the villagers with each other’s products or services, and the basic model of a primitive commu-nist society can be seen as a workable economic model, all things being equal

com-Yet all things are not equal, and a simple barter system soon becomes strained as complexities are brought into the equation such as fluc-tuations in commodity value, delays in the provision of service or ine-qualities in the ability of individuals to trade their labour Some of the inequalities relate to health: What happens if you are fit and healthy with two strapping sons while your neighbour is frail, childless and ailing due to ill health? Some of the inequalities relate to chance inheritance: What if I find gold on my land, while you find Japanese Knotweed on yours? Some of the inequalities relate to more complex issues of seasonal variation: if you take my barrel of oil now but I have to wait until next season to receive your cow, an inadequacy is presented, and I am left,

however temporarily, with a lack—nothing to trade and nothing to eat

other inequalities present themselves in the kind of commodities or services we exchange: if I trade you a consumable (food, let’s say), you have to return to me on a daily basis to keep replenishing your supplies; but if I sell you the means of producing your own sustenance, the trans-action offers a generative return Given the ability to produce your own goods, you can not only subsist by your own means, but you can poten-tially trade your excess to others With numerous inequalities such as these, it is easy to see how the basic premise of a barter system begins to become unravelled Certain individuals rely on a hand-to-mouth exist-ence, perhaps exchanging their labour for food and working daily to make ends meet; other individuals with the means of production begin

to accumulate capital and an increasing capacity to produce over time,

a hierarchy emerges between those who have capital and those who can offer nothing but their labour And if the individuals with power are cor-rupt, greedy or exploitative, the seeds of gross inequality are sown

Perhaps surprisingly, the father of economics Adam Smith oned a political economy in which decisions were made on the basis of self-interest Yet his thinking, now accepted as the “First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics”, proposed that free and compet-itive trade within a just system would not only enable individual pros-perity, but would lead to an ordered economic system which benefitted society as a whole To some, this may have seemed counter-intuitive one might assume that self-interest would lead to a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest society, in which equilibrium is destabilised and a hierarchy of prosperity and loss quickly comes about Yet Smith argued persuasively that such a chaotic scenario is not in the long-term interest

champi-of individuals, however prchampi-ofiteering: although individual business deals may be self-serving transactions benefitting one party apparently more than another, the mechanics of competition and free trade serve as bal-ancing effects, and the overall societal gain is felt by all “Businessmen have an enlightened long-term view of competition, where they rec-ognise the value of reputation and repeat business”, reports Mark Skousen2; “on a general scale, the voluntary self-interest of millions of individuals would create a stable, prosperous society without the need for central direction by the state”.3 In paving the way for future trade, and

in recognising the intrinsic power of the customer in any transaction, free market business relations (according to Adam Smith) result in an equi-table society: “Thus without intending it, without knowing it”, he con-cludes, the capitalist “advance[s] the interests of society”.4 Such has been

the premise of the liberal capitalist economy for over two hundred years:

by individuals serving their own ends, society as a whole benefits

In fact, this might be seen as the first encounter of invisible economics being an influence on a system It’s known as Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” doctrine: the businessman, according to Smith, is “led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants”.5 In invoking the notion of an “invis-ible hand”, Smith explicitly acknowledges something that is metaphor-ically viewed as having human agency Whether the hand is viewed as pointing, pushing or even toiling, as it variously is, this economic model includes in its accounting processes something that adds apparent value despite being derived ostensibly from thin air

Well, in a theoretical model, that might work; yet such a harmonious arrangement was perhaps always destined to be nothing more than uto-pian In free market economies, as we have found to society’s regret, the rich become richer and the poor become dispossessed To be fair, Smith was not blind to such an eventuality, as the caveats implied in his fun-damental theorem attest: the first advocates freedom, the right to trade

as one sees fit; the second relies on competition, which balances prices and forces a parity of trade; but, the third requires a system that is hon-est, with individuals working within a framework that is just In an ideal world, such circumstances could be guaranteed, but forces such as disas-ter, war or invasion further disrupt the terrain; monopolising tendencies threaten competitive trading; and as we have seen, pressures on resources privilege those who have while disenfranchising others who have not In the end, the underpinning self-service in the system wins out, and the equilibrium breaks down to produce inequality Moreover, the landscape

is not equal to begin with, for the world is full of those who cannot for various reasons trade as effectively as others: the elderly and infirm, chil-dren, the sickly and the weak

The inequality between different players in the system was something that occupied Karl Marx’s thoughts throughout most of his writings; the micro-relationship between the capitalist on the one hand and the worker on the other was what stimulated his great, lifelong attack on the processes of capitalism However, to a macroeconomic way of thinking

it is not those micro-relationships that are of primary interest Instead, macroeconomics concerns itself with the net result of that relationship and the way that it informs the macroeconomy The effect may be quite

similar—in other words, both microeconomists and macroeconomists might view the machinations of capitalism with some suspicion However, the means of reaching that conclusion are significantly dif-ferent For microeconomists, it is fundamentally the relationship (of exploitation or of profit potential, depending on your viewpoint), and therefore, the relative power of the individuals involved in that rela-tionship that is of interest For macroeconomists, it is the power of the capital traded that becomes most significant: the profit rather than the profiteering and the exchange rather than the exploitation In order to understand this, it is worth considering the concept of money—in effect promissory notes that can be used as tokens of trade.

With these promises, the trade of commodities and services becomes delayed exchange, ultimately predicated on the labour value we demand for producing our services or commodities: I now charge a rate by the hour for helping with your barn, and you are able to pass on a token that you received when you “sold” your cow In some ways, the system has not changed, all things being equal; the system of promissory notes simply frees up constraints caused by seasonal variations in demand and supply The promissory note I give you for your cow may well return

to me next time you need my oil; or it may embark on a chain of actions as our trade and exchange network of participants become ever more widely spread Armed with a crisp promissory note gained from selling your cow, you come to me to purchase some oil Now I have the note, and with it I purchase vegetable seeds to grow crops for the fol-lowing year Next, it’s the seed merchant’s turn to use the money, and

trans-he does so by paying ttrans-he wtrans-heelwright to fix ttrans-he wtrans-heel on his cart Ttrans-he wheelwright recruits an apprentice, the apprentice spends his money at the pub, and the landlord converts his loft space to offer paying guests accommodation

Here, we can see that the role of money in the economies of exchange

is such that it retains its value: passed from one exchange to another, money never falls victim to being “spent”; indeed, as many economists would have it, this money has proven itself far more valuable than its worth It bought a cow, then fuelled a machine, then planted an allot-ment, then fixed a cart, then employed an apprentice, then had a cel-ebration, and finally, grew the landlord’s business empire by adding

to his property portfolio The money’s worth has been exponentially increased by virtue of its continued activity What is more, all the duties

it has served have themselves created ongoing engines of accumulation: