Economies of Collaboration in Performance

More than the Sum of the Parts

Karen Savage, Dominic Symonds

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319952093
• eBook ISBN: 9783319952109
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This is a book about collaboration in the arts, which explores how working together seems to achieve more than the sum of the parts. It introduces ideas from economics to conceptualize notions of externalities, complementarity, and emergence, and playfully explores collaborative structures such as the swarm, the crowd, the flock, and the network. It uses up-to-date thinking about Wikinomics, Postcapitalism, and Biopolitics, underpinned by ideas from Foucault, Bourriaud, and Hardt and Negri. In a series of thought-provoking case studies, the authors consider creative practices in theatre, music and film. They explore work by artists such as Gob Squad, Eric Whitacre, Dries Verhoeven, Pete Wyer, and Tino Seghal, and encounter both live and online collaborative possibilities in fascinating discussions of Craigslist and crowdfunding at the Edinburgh Festival. What is revealed is that the introduction of Web 2.0 has enabled a new paradigm of artistic practice to emerge, in which participatory encounters, collaboration, and online dialogue become key creative drivers. Written itself as a collaborative project between Karen Savage and Dominic Symonds, this is a strikingly original take on the economics of working together.

© The Author(s) 2018

Karen Savage and Dominic SymondsEconomies of Collaboration in Performancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95210-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Karen Savage¹ and Dominic Symonds¹

(1)

University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

Karen Savage (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Dominic Symonds

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

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 population 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 position. 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 pollinate 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 honeybees 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 disappearing and an estimated 746,640 jobs being lost. ² With these statistics, it’s evident that bees more than justify their existence and their reputation as collaborative workers.

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 recognising 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 inspection 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 acquisition 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 microeconomic 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 annum ⁵ ), tuberculosis ($4.8bn ⁶ ), water hygiene ($3bn) and sanitation (£13bn ⁷ ) 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 further 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 economics 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 identify “positive externalities”, nor the way in which collaborative practices maximise their gain; however, the particular focus of our book—the economics of artistic collaboration—is something that has not been viewed 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 evidence 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 mechanical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from the social force that is developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided operation”, 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 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 individual 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

Our aim in this book is not to bamboozle readers with complex economic theory, as the terms “complementarity” and “emergence” might suggest, but rather to introduce some of the affordances of economics 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 concepts in economic thought—first, the ideas of Wikinomics, ¹³ Cognitive Capitalism ¹⁴ and Post-capitalism, ¹⁵ and then the idea of Biopolitics. ¹⁶ 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 synergy, especially in relation to collaborative acts. One of our favourites 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 ridiculed 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 discovered 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 economics 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, reconceptualising 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 of the financial crisis, causing the dynamics between individuals working 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 scientific 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 maximise user efficiency; Uber has controversially offered a different economic model for taxi provision in major cities by decentralising the service providers and turning to freelance operatives; and new types of encyclopaedia 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 “collaborative commons”, ¹⁷ or the “networked information economy”, ¹⁸ a “technological, economic, and organizational transformation 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 ultim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Economics
• 3. Collaboration
• 4. Biopolitics
• 5. Network
• 6. Audience
• 7. Host
• 8. Swarm
• 9. Crowd
• 10. Conclusion
• Back Matter