co-labour-abling

We believe collaboration is a process of meaning creation and generation, through a call for action, addressing a shared concern through various stakeholders, communities and partners constructing multiple alternatives through an evaluative process, building a collective knowing – ‘Knowledge’. Collaboration comes from the Latin ‘collaborare’, ‘work together’, towards a joint production or creation. It is the action of working together with someone to produce something. Collaboration is fundamental to human experience, in this sense we, our ‘selves’ are a social construction. The making of work – ‘praxis’ [from the Greek word prattein, (do), towards praxis (doing)] through a process of deconstruction offer ethical consequences towards labour, made. This includes how we decide a story/narrative and where and when this begins and ends (if it does) to augment access and reading of a work from poiesis to praxis. Labour through collaboration becomes a process of ‘co-labour-abling’, thereby expanding the ‘gift economy exchange’ paradigm of excess and sacrifice including its questions of power and privilege. Sharing ideas, information, technologies and skills in a non-hierarchical mode, is crucial towards building a platform towards collaboration that constructs the possibilities of ‘polytely’(Greek poly- and -tel- meaning ‘many goals’ and can be described as complex problem-solving situations characterized by the presence of multiple simultaneous goals).

‘Knowledge’, as in the idea of ‘learning facts’ (Pea); what groups learn is often practices rather than facts, ways of doing things. Tacit or practical knowing actually has an epistemological priority over explicit or theoretical knowing. To understand a proposition requires that one already have immense amounts of background ontological knowing about the world, about people and about the kinds of objects referred to by the proposition. Language is a form of communication and interaction with other people and with the world – to understand language one must understand it within the context of a broader tacit pre-understanding of social interaction and of the everyday world of ordinary life (Heidegger). It is in the process of building collaborative knowing; there is an interplay between tacit and explicit knowing. The mark of a really successful design or problem-solving meeting is that something brilliant comes out of it that cannot be attributed to an individual or to a combination of individual contributions. It is an emergent, which means that if you look at a transcript of the meeting you can see the conceptual object taking shape but you cannot find it in the bits and pieces making up the discourse (Bereiter). Discourse, which makes things explicit, relies on a background of tacit or practical knowing. The co-construction of shared knowing in discourse involves the negotiation of tacit meanings, for instance of the affordances of artefacts. The network of these meanings constitutes the social world in which we live and which we come to understand by building collaborative knowing. Epistemology asks how knowledge is possible; social epistemology shows how knowing is interactively constructed within communities (G Stahl).

A rendering that we propose is working together with the other in cooperation (bringing into action/contact), against the constructed norm – ‘co-labor’ and ‘co-labor-ableing’. ‘Co-labor-ableing’ thus may construct and build an empowering and enabling ‘commune‘ from within, one that owns the means of production and controls the modes of dissemination through a constant negotiation between the ‘co-labourers‘ and a ‘commune’ ownership of the production thereby no longer on constructing a communication/message/code derived from and only speaking back to a particular class. Further, this process allows each to contribute, each to their own personal means, time, purpose and commitments. 

It is in this process of co-labouring that we believe, its dissemination also lies within the domain of the creative commons.

REFERENCES

The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud – Derrida, Thevenin

How to Talk About the Body? – Bruno Latour

The question of Technology – Martin Heideggar

Hegemony and Revolution – Antonio Gramsci

Homo Faber – Claude Alvares

Critique of Pure Reason – Emmanuel Kant

Gender Trouble – Judith Butler

Cyborg Manifesto – Donna Haraway

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin

The Body in Pain – Elaine Scarry

Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper

The Road to Objects – Graham Harman

The Universe of Things – Steven Shaviro

7 Bridges of Konigsburg – Rob Shields

Collaboration – Wency Mendes

The Body – Wency Mendes

co-labour-abling – Wency Mendes