ON COLLABORATION

COLLABORATION

   The collaborator should always be treated with suspicion.
   As long as society remains organized hierarchically, with the corporation as the atomic basis for its molecular structure, collaboration will always be a suspect activity. Far from being an exercise in the free exchange of ideas and work, collaboration is a treacherous, alienating form of labor.
   The collaborator is a courier to power. One collaborates with the Regime, the Party, Business-As-Usual--one doesn't collaborate with comrades. A collaborator is a traitor. Denying responsibility and always protecting his self interest, the collaborator hopes to save himself by avoiding authorship.
   In a self-determined, utopian community, collaboration would not exist. That is why collaborations are always premised on the creation of a utopia: abstract, ideal forms of intellectual cooperation are proposed to erase the traces of material and hierarchical differences among the participants. At its best, collaboration produces brilliant displays of specialized discourse. The collaborator learns to think on his feet, and talk fast, for fear that he might end up in a ditch with the other traitors.

THE TRAITOR

   In contemporary society, artists naturally learn to self-identify as traitors. Lacking sustained patronage from government institutions, and largely regarded as social parasites, artists practice both covert and open forms of treason as if it were the very essence of their craft.
   The contemporary artist is a dissimulator. His task consists in hiding the fact that he is an artist--to convince the public, in fact, that he is not an artist at all. His performances are a form of public apology, a life-long atonement for his chosen vocation.
   In the end, this practice of dissimulation is only the betrayal of his own craft and metaphysical commitment. Rather than practice non-art as an artist, or become a custodian of culture, the path of the wise consists in ditching art and culture altogether and developing a loyalty and commitment to an alternate reality.

ALLIANCE

   The wise one seeks for allies. Whereas collaboration implies a world of alienation and labor, necessitating enforced cooperation among employees, or the practice of treason, alliance contains within it a key to the ALL (primordial unity).
   Shifting ones alliance from the civilized world to the wilderness, one discovers allies in rocks, trees, rivers, deer, squirrels, snakes, spiders, and even other human beings. The world of alliance is a shifting one: changing shape, one discovers affinity groups and alternate realities.
   Alliances can be made or broken. Still, in their warrior aspect, they hold out the possibility of ecstasy at the axis of sex and death. The star warrior, or daughter of Nyx, has traversed the codes of the civilized world, and shifted her alliance to the axis of earth and sky. She is one of the original allies, and may be called upon in times of isolation.


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