Introduction: The Fishbowl
We are 85 participants performing an ethnographic community focused on thinking about, doing, viewing, sharing, supporting, and critiquing our world in a digital fishbowl. We are a mass of autonomous labor and a multitude of productive singularities. The fishbowl is born of a new analysis of labor organization, wherein the value of one’s labor, like the value of our postings in the fishbowl, becomes the cognitive and immaterial product of creative action and escapes any valuation in objective terms. Our performance as an ethnographic community is not judged by formal criteria but by evoking dormant subjectivities. New social relations emerged from multiple interacting postings of individual thoughts, consciousness, and actions.

Purpose: Performativity and Performance
Ethnographers use methods like participant observation to explore the meanings and significance of performances from the performers’ perspectives. Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change. Our purpose is to examine our process and practices through the lens of performativity: the idea that identities, social relations, and cultural meanings are not fixed but are constantly being enacted and reproduced through performance.

Method: The Common and Living Labor
1. Responding to the text in letters sent two or three times a week, participants post in a digital fishbowl, a labor of Vocabulary, Google Searches, and Subjective experiences.
2. Participants assemble a ‘common’ source of resources: words, ideas, concepts, symbols, and images by deconstructing and decoding the given text twice or thrice a week as ‘living labor.’
3. Individuals navigate the unknown in the given text by observation and interpretation, one word at a time, and raising the question, "What did you mean by that?”
4. Participants develop habits like sorting, sifting, selecting, and substituting words, which are living practices and the site of creation and innovation.

Result: Singular Subjectivities and Higher Levels of Order
1. A fluid system of reflections emerged within the triad: Meaning of words, Searching for theory, and Subjective expressions.
2. The ethnographic community performance was an activity, not a result; it was an assemblage or an open continuity of subjective processes. Subjectivities were generated by the dynamism between the ‘common’ and ‘living labor’ that renewed itself reflexively and recursively in numerous expressions. In this spiral, each successive movement from subjectivity to the ‘common’ was an innovation that resulted in a richer reality.
3. New relations of words were the emergence of order from nonlinear relationships among multiple interacting thoughts, consciousness, and actions. A higher-level order spontaneously emerged from seemingly chaotic interactions at a lower level. Our paper presents our attempt at understanding our experience of this relational performance.

Bottom line: Participants performed an ethnographic community by sharing, comparing, and contrasting subjective processes.

References:
[1] Monika Kostera & Pawel Krzyworzeka, "How To Be An Ethnographer," 2023
[2] Antonio Negri, "The Porcelain Workshop, For a New Grammar of Politics," 2008
[3] Butler, Judith (1988). "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory". Theatre Journal. 40 (4): 520. Retrieved May 3, 2024

Keywords: Performativity, Ethnographic Community, Living Labor, Singular, Multitude, Subjectivity, Process.