Conscientious Collaboration: Some Scenarios

Goofus and Gallant, an American children's comic strip that appeared monthly in Highlights for ChildrenThe following piece appears as part of the month-long series “Conscientious Conceptualism and Poetic Practice” on the blog, curated by guest editor Andy Verboom.AuthorshipWhat if your collaborator is working with a ghost writer?What if two collaborators each hire a ghostwriter to write their portions of the work, such that the two ghostwriters are now collaborating unknowingly?What if two collaborators, each unbeknownst to the other, hire the same ghostwriter—who, in order to maximize profits, tells neither?What if you hijack your collaborator’s point in a co-written doc?What if your collaborator is just someone you made up as a gimmick?What if your collaborator introduces a third collaborator?What if your collaborator is Thomas Pynchon or Elena Ferrante?What if your mother’s favourite part of the book was written by your collaborator?What if non-human agents do not count as collaborators?What if your collaborator simply copy-pastes your last contribution and calls it repetition?What if your collaborator’s writing becomes so much a study of yours that your singularity and originality in the literary marketplace effectively depreciates by half?What if you aren’t collaborators but they call you that?Ownership What if someone comes in just now as you’re writing and says, “Who’s in charge, here?”What if your collaborator enjoys making subtle changes to your work that they hope you will not notice?What if you are asked to explain a symbol your collaborator has used and realize that you do not understand it?What if your collaborator’s writing is so entwined with your own that, if they decide at the last minute that they don’t want to publish it, your work is inextricable?What if you realize that each of your contributions is singular enough to be detached from the other without sustaining damage?What if the cheque is made out in your collaborator’s name?What if the latest conceptual writing anthology has room for only five pages of your work—and four of those pages are your collaborator’s?What if your collaborator includes as part of your work a story told to both of you by a mutual friend?What if your collaborator is an ethnographer whose source material is interviews with you, their research subject?What if your collaborator and you sign a contract that says you may reuse and recycle each other’s work freely for the rest of your lives?Power and RepresentationWhat if your collaborator’s “ironic” gestures become increasingly impossible to separate from sincere support for oppressive structures, positions, or ideas?What if your collaborator thinks that “conceptualism” is a sufficient excuse or protective shield for pieces that are intrinsically hurtful?What if your collaborator is your thesis supervisor?What if your collaborator is a powerful gatekeeper to a literary community you (hope to) belong to?What if your collaborator has books, theories, fellowships, prizes, and writer-in-residencies and you are an emerging writer?

What if your collaborator’s 'ironic' gestures become increasingly impossible to separate from sincere support for oppressive structures, positions, or ideas?

What if your collaborator has a different subject-position, different relations to power, different access to privilege, to wealth, to celebrity?What if your collaborator hopes to rewrite, tokenize, or otherwise exploit your identity or experience? What if the collaborative form you adopt (i.e., a Japanese renga) is more familiar to your collaborator or belongs to a literary tradition unique to their culture? What if your collaboration multiplies the effects of a toxic power you both wield over narratives or within communities?What if you start off as an employee and, somewhere along the way, become a collaborator?What if you began as an “outside eye” and, along the way, it’s you who makes the most significant contributions?Interpersonal EthicsWhat if your collaborator shows you this list?What if your collaborator employs a recurring theme as a cry for help that you fail to notice or comment on?What if your collaborator invites an unknown person into the Google Doc?  What if your collaborator, being an American citizen, is eligible for a MacArthur Fellowship but you, being Canadian, are not?What if your collaborator goes on strike?What if our collaborator only knows about one of us?What if you become aware of your collaborator’s animadversions against your work only after it is published?What if your collaborator, a hunger artist, is toiling away in the name of a concept that is injurious to their health and well-being?What if your collaborator brings material from your relationship (letters, emails, etc.) into the work?What if your collaborator’s response to your work is always monosyllabic ... some variation of “cool”?What if your collaborator steps into the process for no other reason than needing money?What if your collaborator is not “literate” or is abled in such a way that writing is difficult for them?What if your collaborator’s mental illness influences their conception of language and narrative in a way you don’t understand?What if your collaborator never reads what you write?VoiceWhat if your collaborator tells you that “reading it isn’t the point”?What if your collaborator thinks you should pursue a different line of questioning that begins, “What if I …”?What if your collaborator writes more convincingly as you—in imitation of you—than you do naturally?What if your collaborator is concrete and you are abstract?What if your collaborator does all the writing and you do all the speaking?What if your collaborator uses the text colour you’d been using?What if your collaborator delegates all of their subsequent contributions to your book to a highly-specialized Bayesian algorithm?What if your collaborator delegates all of their subsequent contributions to your book to random/celebrity volunteers on Twitter?What if digital humanities tools reveal that your collaborator uses the pronouns “I” and “me” 225 percent more than you?What if you and your collaborator, try as you both might, fail to convincingly establish a hybrid subjectivity?What if there is no “third mind”?What if the language or the very logic of your collaboration isn’t accessible to anyone but you both, making it a kind of elaborate inside joke?What if your collaborator writes about an uncomfortable topic like coprophagia but you do not want to upset your family?What if your collaborator thinks it would be an extension of your book’s conceptual practice to publish via an author mill but you think it would be an extension of your book’s conceptual practice to destroy the manuscript?

What if your collaborator never reads what you write? … What if your collaborator tells you that 'reading it isn’t the point'?

What if editors, publishers, and the media contrive to delineate your work (what you wrote vs. what your collaborator wrote) through obvious typographical and design cues?What if your collaborator anticipates a robot future?Ideology and IdeationWhat if your collaborator believes in the death of the author and you don’t?What if your and your collaborator’s closed-loop writing process is actually an echo chamber?What if your collaborator thinks your project is conceptual and you don’t? What if your collaborator conceives of your shared work as analogous to the Hobbesian motif of the sword-wielding sovereign’s many-peopled body but you are an anarchist? What if your collaborator subscribes to Proudhon’s dictum that property is theft but doesn’t apply this idea with any evident consistency?What if your collaborator additionally tells you to “stop” and “listen” and then loops in a nearly-unmodified Queen/Bowie bassline?What if there are important lessons to be gleaned for conscientious collaboration in the difference between “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby”?What if your collaborator insists that the work is the relationship and not the text?What if your collaborator is self-censoring?What if your collaborator reads your conceptual project as hard-line fiction and you read it as hard-line documentary?

What if there are important lessons to be gleaned for conscientious collaboration in the difference between 'Under Pressure' and 'Ice Ice Baby'?

What if you want to fight the discourse of land tenure that surrounds web documents?What if your collaborator has been getting all of their ideas (down to the last noun phrase) from a 1966 Highlights for Children magazine?What if this is vaporwave?What if your collaborator works under self-imposed constraints that appear to actually hurt the quality of their writing?What if your collaborator, knowingly or unknowingly, fails to consistently adhere to a mutual constraint?What if your writing experiments become more acrobatic for the same reason that sex might?What if your collaborator’s creativity gets in the way of your uncreativity?What if your collaborator is a minimalist and you are a maximalist?What if your collaborator wants to write the unreadable but can’t do so within the strictures of a collaborative writing relationship in which there’s always an audience (of at least one)? Worst- and Best-Case ScenariosWhat if your collaborator has a better lawyer?What if your collaborator decides that the book will only be released in a print run of one and the person who buys it is Martin Shkreli?What if your collaborator is a collaborationist?What if your collaborator is Vidkun Quisling?What if your collaborator moonlights as a pro-Putin Twitter troll and their arguments and prosody have clearly been honed by their time working with you?What if your collaborator steals your real-world identity?What if your collaborator and you both die—and it falls to your families to fight over the publication? What if only one of you is willing to conduct interviews, book tours, and publicity junkets?What if both of you are willing to conduct interviews, book tours, and publicity junkets?What if your collaborator insists on bequeathing their papers to Monash University, Australia, and you insist on bequeathing yours to the Università degli Studi di Firenze?What if your collaborator and you cannot decide whose name to put first on the document?What if you received an award that was actually meant for your collaborator?What if your collaborator thinks everything is a zero-sum game?What if your collaborator describes themselves as “the brains of this here operation”?What if your collaborator floats a dead shark in embalming solution?What if your collaborator insists on printing out a physical copy of everything you write?What if your collaborator has been recording all of your conversations for the past three years and intends to publish all the most damning things you said in a piece called Gossip?What if your collaborator is a rat? Final ThoughtsWhat if the ongoing extratextual dialogue between collaborators during their joint conceptual practice, being a part of the writing process, necessarily belongs in the work?What if something about the human brain or ego prevents you from mistaking your collaborator’s words with your own (even if you want to), such that their words, even if they merge seamlessly with yours like the fingers of two hands, are always set apart by a razor’s-edge of separation?What if time heals the razor’s-edge of separation—not right away but over an interval of decades?What if no longer worrying about who wrote what feels incredibly liberating—like failing to make an important phone call you’ve been afraid to make all day, accepting the consequences of that failure, and then discovering that the consequences are minor?What if, on the contrary, the consequences are dire?Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Jack met while running up six flights of stairs. (They were late for a test.) Since then, they have been writing, playing basketball, and trying to meet deadlines together. Currently collaborating on a work in the tradition of Bouvard and Pécuchet, they live in separate houses in Vancouver, BC.