Collectivity is something that takes place as we arbitrarily gather to take part in different forms of cultural activity such as looking at art. If we countenance that beyond all the roles that are allotted to us in culture –roles such as those of being viewers, listeners or audience members in one capacity or another — there are other emergent possibilities for the exchange of shared perspectives or insights or subjectivities — we allow for some form of emergent collectivity. Furthermore that performative collectivity , one that is produced in the very act of being together in the same space and compelled by similar edicts, might just alert us to a form of mutuality which cannot be recognised in the normative modes of shared beliefs, interests or kinship.

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“If being-with is the sharing of a simultaneous space-time, then it involves a presentation of this space-time as such. In order to say ‘we’ one must present the ‘here and now’ of this ‘we’. Or rather saying ‘we’ brings about the presentation of the ‘here and now’, however it is determined; as a room, a region, a group of friends, an association, a ‘people’. We can never simply be the ‘the we’ understood as a unique subject … . ‘We’ always expresses a plurality, expresses ‘our’ being divided and entangled; ‘one’ is not ‘with’ in some general sort of way , but each time according to determined modes that are themselves multiple and simultaneous (people, culture,language, lineage, network, group, couple, band and so on). What is presented in this way, each time, is a stage (scène) on which several can say ‘I’ each on his own account, each in turn”. (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Being Singular Plural”)

[from the essay “We – Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations” by Irit Rogoff]