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Re: What's in a name?

Julia

Jan 23, 2004 14:51 PST

What's in a name? - everything of course. But also nothing - since names are ultimately only
acquiesced to by our usage of them.

All words are loaded by their weighty history, associations, context and so on, mostly by the
memories of those alive and speaking them. But we are free at any moment to create new
terms, new phrases, new metaphors - which is usually a lot easier and more effective than trying
to reinvest or rehabilitate a worn-out word. The advantages gained by this practice are those of
the poet - to leverage the elasticity of language in order to generate and contain new meaning.
The way in which a new term becomes useful or junk depends really on how thoughtfully it is
coined, applied and filled with meaning.

I'm not in any way suggesting ignorance or insensitivity to the past - truly it is the foundation of
the environment in which we live, and it is what informs us that the term "collaboration" is loaded
with a lot of negative meanings that may prevent it from being useful in a new context. It seems
to me that this particular process we are participating in is about shaping a future vision. What
about the term "free cooperation"? If it is currently unencumbered by stale associations, how
can we fill it with meanings that simultaneously describe and create a new praxis?

Cooperative/integrative work seems to be a cultural response to the isolating tendencies of
extreme specialisation. It is not, however, a methodology that comes naturally or easily to many
of us trained in individual achievement and success models. So much of what Trebor has
provocatively laid out is a structure to begin thinking about what we want these practices to look
like. Although I would not wish to question the perspicacity of your observations, Srdjan, I for
one am more interested in the creative possibilies of the future than the handicaps of a valid but
limiting past.

Cheers!
Julia Cole

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Srdjan Normal wrote:

 
Cooperation, Collaboration or What?
*please free to join this conversation.

Srdjan Normal:
Trebor, in your text on "working together" on the Free Cooperation List you write:
"In post-WWII times, for instance, Slovenians and Croatians were portrayed on Serbian
Television broadcasts as Nazi sympathizers. Today, the Slovenian group "Laibach" provokes
the audience with references to these historical traumas with post-industrial music."
 We were told in the school that Kolaborator was the word used by the communist propaganda
in the former Yugoslavia, for sure, yes. However, there was always a noun, of whom the
kolaborator was associated with, and the noun had a national note. So you had people saying
kolaborator in different languages or accents that signified whether we were talking of a good or
a bad one (usually they were all bad, but at certain times collaborating with the Russians was
ok, as well as collaboration with English, French and Americans was seen fine). In fact, this
process of negative connotation, called: the labeling of the internal enemy, or the purge, was
often ending up in a Rashomon effect of over-labeling (of the Kurosawa's movie) quite often in
the critical press, for years.
 However, in this quote above, I think that you point to the "doers" of political 'software' that
was at hand, a very crude one, that had its sparks during the collapse of the political hardware.
Still, as we were taught, and we kind of know the history, that Slovenian and Croatian
governments, at the time of the WWII euphoria, were voluntarily or opportunistically in the Nazi
system. One cannot deny that. This does not mean that their people were voluntarily in that
system, which we also know now. Take the communists that sprang the partisan resistance in
Yugoslavia: Tito himself was Slovenian, from a Croatian border, and Edvard Kardelj, the main
ideologue of the liberal Communist Yugoslavia was Slovenian as well.
 
Trebor Scholz:
The term "collaborator" is still brutally loaded. In German, French, Hebrew, and Dutch the term
for sure is referring still to Nazi collaborators. We can't just ignore that people use the word that
way.
 I was not pointing fingers at the Serbian government but gave the broadcasts as example of
the use of the term, which was correct as indeed, like you say, Croats and Slovenians were
collaborating with the Nazis.
 
SN:
This is a historical fact..as much as it is that Bosnian Serbs shelled Sarajevo, and
Montenegrin officers, under the Yugoslava army bombed Dubrovnik "in order to rebuild it more
beautiful and older" and Americans bombed Belgrade in order to initiate democracy. In my
opinion, loaded terms are all over the place, perhaps this is why net-works, net-timing, and
virtual architecture, and analogical architectures, succeed in inventing, or hybridizing new terms,
that often sound non-human, robotic or else, however, the distinction between human and
inhuman, is analogous to the fabricated distinction between nature and the human environment,
like the city. Thus you have a lot of
 jumble, which we also like sometimes for perverse pleasures, however with a tag that they
don't last, they are self-determinable, and need to be replaced. Still we are dealing with the
accumulation of the junk terminology...
 
TS:
I find the term "Free Cooperation" cuts you loose from many other connotations. The way
Christoph Spehr describes Free Cooperation is inspiring for me. It's quite an helpful term to avoid
the unclear terminology. I'm not sure, however, if the term can really replace all others. Free
cooperation is not collaboration. It refers to quite a specific concept that Spehr developed in
"Gleicher als andere." Another aspect that is left out is that of the gendering of the term, which
was brought up by Stefan Roemer.
 
SN:
In that light, a debate on the meanings of collaboration is very much needed and it may be
fantastic to do on a larger scale. The questions is: what would one do with the result, after the
term becomes potentially absolved (and that is a Catholic tradition...to be absolved from the sins
say a couple of Hail Marries instead of Heil H...you know whom I mean).
 
TS:
How can this all become concrete and real in the world? We need to be specific about the kind
of practices that will emerge out of our cooperations. Whom do we support when working
together?
 There is a wide array of cooperative practices that we will look at in this conference. Despite
their specific differences these projects have much in common. Issues of scalability, (collective)
leadership, goals, crediting, rules, motivations, micro-sociology, organizational structures,
independence, individuation, solidarity, competition, play, sustainability, equality, and
organizational tools are overarching.
 
SN:
The senses react when the terms, or the meanings, reach beyond self-organizing potential,
like when they get national, or class-like. To hash-out clichés would be one option to proceed in
order to move beyond mere project to 'clear' the term from its accumulated meanings.
 Another telling example, of when and how sometimes the accumulated meanings get back in
use, is the New York Times reporting on the Sadam's capture. Instead of saying that he was
swearing like hell (in Arabic) during the investigation, they wrote that "he was exercising his
French" which is an old English slang, politically, but not nationally correct.
 So...what are you actually trying to do here? Are there any fears attached to this quest of
clearing out the load for "collaboration"? And, what is very important, who today is still
remembering this abuse of the term, in connection to the finger-point-you-are-Nazi propaganda?
It would be curious to know whether there are communities that (like Jewish organizations in fear
of a repeating the holocaust) act today.
 
TS:
The term collaborator is still burdened with heavy historical baggage.   I'm not imagining it- I
see it over and over in conversations. That may change over the years. Which terms do you
suggest?
 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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