What does collectivity mean? What does collectivity do?
Which is the meaning to be found in collective approaches to publishing practices?
What are the different (mis)understandings of “acting collectively”, or “publishing collectively”?
What are the forms into which collectiveness can transform?
Is there a collective understanding of collectivity?
Where does collectivity start, and where does it end? Does it ever start? Does it ever end?
Who does it include, and who does it exclude?
Does collectivity have an inside? Does it have an outside? Is publishing a border? A landmark? A cliff?
How is an audience positioned? How does an audience adopt a position?
What is an invitation? What is a host? What is collective responsibility?
How do we practice collective agency?
Where do we learn to act collectively? How do we train to act collectively?
"Publiqueshions" (Published questions)
This is a method suggesting to make a private concern public, through formulating it as a list of questions. It may be applied by one or more people at an advanced stage of a process leading to publishing.
Start by gathering the questions, these may be questions relating issues that were either at the origin of, or encountered throughout a research process. The questions may be carriers of disconcerting situations, unresolved affairs, controversial matters or sensitive issues needing to be handled and shared with care. If the list needs to be edited, it may be useful to think of a narrative. Which questions may represent "access points", and therefor placed at the start of the list?
This method may be helpful in situations where a process is aimed at being published rather than a "set" outcome. Questions are used as a format to invite a potential audience to think along with those who "make things public", and through their interrogative nature, they demand their listener to position themselves. A list of questions may be shared with an audience prior to a text or in order to introduce a publication, a presentation, etc. After the list is published, do not expect immediate answers—let the questions simmer. Let them become new meeting points for discussions.
The aim of this publication, rather than drafting answers, is to invite whomever these questions may affect to think along and take position towards unresolved issues lingering above the un-demarcated field where collectives care to publish.
What follows is a corpus of four letters respectively addressed to Jeanne van Heeswijk, Erica Gargaglione, Carolina Castro and Chaiyoung Kim (Chae)—but also, to all of them at once and, ultimately, "to whom it may affect".
Each addressee is concerned with collective approaches whether their practice comprises rehearsing collectiveness, inspecting and documenting mechanics of self-organised cultural organisations, actually co-organising activities within a cultural organisation or more particularly questioning the affect of intimacy on publishing practices through experiments. At last, I would like to acknowledge all addressees for having played a consented or incidental role in the process and the publication of this epistolary chronicle.
Departing from a local issue—itself stemming from the context-specific process of a collective publication—these letters intend to give an account of recurring conflicts relating to collective processes.
The publishing of private missives both represents an invitation and a record of the relations involved in a process that is challenging to document or that may be overridden by its design. These series of epistles are punctuated with a collection of methods to practice collectiveness in publishing contexts. In turn, the suggested methods may be enacted and adapted to any collectivity.