UC Riverside

This dissertation explores how creative collaborative practice transforms subjectivity, before it is leveraged as an industrial resource. Raising key questions about the nature of collaborative practice itself, I discuss in detail the histories and processes of select collaborative groups in order to unfold an idea of intensity among participants that exceeds the boundaries of each artist without eradicating individuality. I argue that from the commingled exchange occurring in a material and discursive mash-up called "the mangle," emergent onto-epistemologies arise that disrupt static physical and identity formations. From this disruption, the ways in which language or sense-making functions are transformed and begin to include alternative ways of knowing that occur in bafflement, the inability to comprehend, and dysfunction. I work rigorously to transform the chaotic status of these negative terms into something that can be understood as lively, creative, and transformative in their own right and not merely opposites of order, understanding, clarity, and sanity. Overall, the project is highly trans-disciplinary in that I analyze art works and art practices, films, musical performances, composition techniques, and my own long-term creative collaborative work with a group called Multipoint. Further, in a very focused effort to transgress disciplinary boundaries, I place Material Feminism and post-Marxist theory alongside the philosophical works of Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Agamben, and Derrida. Divided into five chapters, the project addresses different aspects of intricate sharing and mangled time. The preface and the first chapter introduce the concept of trans-subjectivity and outline a chaotic, intense description of collaborative practice as I conceive it for this project, tracing a myopic history from the 1950s to the present to consider various forms of collaboration and their effects. The second chapter imagines networked, complex bodies in the video works of Natalie Bookchin and in installation art generally. The third considers the way language becomes complicated and remade through forms of virtuosity and incomprehensibility, while the fourth develops a theory of a-productivity involving lingering in conditions of highly queered time. The last chapter reads Giorgio Agamben's "whatever being" through Derrida's concept of impossible hospitality to envision the potentials for emergent forms of community.