Since Each of Us Was Several: Collaboration in the Context of the Differential Self

This chapter draws from the work of the US performance company, Goat Island and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to develop the concept of the ‘differential self’: a self preceded and ceaselessly (re-)constituted by its relations. It argues that the differential self requires us to expand the definition of collaboration – not simply as work by more than one person, but a continuum of activities by individual authors, as well as groups. The chapter proposes that Deleuze and Guattari, and Goat Island, dismantle the (real) myth of individual autonomy through collaborative activity, but that this is not tantamount to a rejection of a natural self-presence. It concludes that philosophy and performance are not the products of pre-existing subjects – however unified or dispersed – but productions of subjectivities, plural