This is an article written by a writer for Athabasca University's Student Voice magazine which covers issues regarding collectives and more specifically Roy Was Here.

Collective activity has always been integral to human production and creativity. In precivilized times firewood was gathered for ceremonial and cooking fires. In agricultural settings harvest was a massive collective effort. During the Medieval era pottery guilds built their kilns and communities wherever clay seams could be found. Throughout the Modern epoch artist collectives have based themselves around common ideas and methods. Artists have always expressed the basic human desire for freedom to express feelings on subjects which transcend the bounds of language. The Roy Was Here collective manifests this desire for freedom to express, create and communicate and to reach as wide an audience as possible.

The urge to become fully human by expressing oneself is suggested by the Marxian term “species being”. The collective itself as a natural method of social creation is elucidated by the Deleuzian term “multiplicity”. Yet what collectives actually produce is perhaps most important of all.

In the ancient world collective action often involved forced labour or slavery. The Egyptian pyramids and sphinx are examples of this rigid, unyielding and authoritative collective form. Yet no one can deny the mystery of these creations. They seem to harbour something transcendental and otherworldly. Perhaps the pyramids and sphinx simply represent what people can do when they exert their will towards a common goal. In today's competitive and individualist environment what could seem more alien than collective expression?

Today's social environment is in many ways still controlled by authoritative people who squelch humanity's creative desires. Yet within this oppressive realm there remains room for resistance. As the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard stated “Reality is not so much a bitch as it is a sphinx!” Dogmatic rigidity can give way to catlike reflexivity. The mystery and awe inspired by the sphinx of Egypt would surely pale in comparison to the creativity produced by collectives directly only by the impulses of participating individuals. The Roy Was Here collective represents a possibility such as this.


Just as the Egyptian sphinx was created by slave labour, many T Shirts people wear today are produced using minimal creativity and in mass quantities by underpaid workers. Expression becomes a slave to profits. Yet without profits economic reality hits hard. So, as in any production-based realm, ownership or control of the means of production is key. By owning their own equipment and making T-Shirts out of fair-wage source materials, Roy Was Here avoids oppressing workers while remaining economically sound.

T Shirts are relatively inexpensive. They are a proletariat canvas, a “medium for the masses”. As Marx noted during his lifetime, when Capitalist globalization was just beginning to ravage non-Western cultures, “the cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery...which batters down all Chinese walls” (Sayer, 1991, p. 53). The Roy Was Here collective is in a unique position to invert this destructive process by producing what Capitalism has the most difficulty in providing: the opportunity for authentic self-expression. Artists who might not otherwise be exposed can have their works sold in T Shirt form and reach a huge audience of eyes. This will pummel our society's barriers to expression which take the form of funding cuts by governments and monopolization of market access by corporations.

It is hard to think of anything more liberating than self-expression. This is the idea behind modern collectives. They enable the true desires of participants to take shape and become literally or metaphorically animated. This 'life of its own' persona is, according to the two-man social theory collective of Gilles Deleuze and Felixe Guattari, a function of how we are as human individuals. For Deleuze and Guattari we each embody a multiplicity of selves. “There is always a collectivity, even when you are alone”. (D and G 1000 Plateus, p. 152) What they mean by this is that we each have many versions of ourselves depending on the social situation. Each time a person creates or expresses something they are producing another aspect of themselves. In this way a collective is a natural outcropping of human nature. When functioning best, a collective overcomes the dyad of “one/many” and becomes a “shared identity, shared but separate”. (Gillian) Humming like power lines in an electrical storm, a collective represents creative capacity exceeding its component parts. It becomes an action, a “funnelling together of ideas from different sources/people/places to create something bigger and exciting”. (Gillian)

Human social activity naturally takes collective form. Outcomes may be practical or impractical, edible or aesthetic. Whereas many artifacts of human society, such as the Egyptian sphinx, are the product of forced collective action, the greatest possibility for liberatory expression lies in collectives controlled by participants and working towards inclusive goals. The Roy Was Here collective combines these two aspects by being non-hierarchical and making affordable products that can be consumed by anyone.

Jason Hazel-rah Sullivan

Labels: Athabasca, baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Hazel Sullivan, Jason Hazel-rah Sullivan, Marx, medium for the masses, post modern, proletariat, reflexivity, Roy Was Here, sphinx, t-shirts