Paul Rabinow - Collaboration

Collaboration

A defining feature of the venues Rabinow has called for and worked on is collaboration. Understood as a mode of work, Rabinow defines collaboration in distinction to cooperation. A cooperative mode of work consists in “demarcated tasking on distinct problems and objects, with occasional if regular exchange.” Cooperation does not entail either a common definition of problems or shared techniques of remediation. A collaborative mode of work, by contrast, proceeds from an interdependent division of labor on shared problems. It entails a common definition of problems (or acceptance of a problem-space).

Rabinow calls for the invention of new modes of collaboration where problem-spaces are unstable or emergent, and where prior problems and their significance can no longer be taken for granted and can fruitfully be contested. Such situations require the reworking of existing modes of reasoning and intervention, adjusting these modes to the topography of the emerging problem-space. It follows that collaboration is a mode of work appropriate to the anthropology of the contemporary