The Questions  ·  the collective · moments

When is a collective?

A group is not a permanent object that happens to change. It is a configuration, and configurations have edges — which means there is a moment when this collective stops and another begins.

A collective’s moment is its three seats held in one configuration.

Change any one and the moment has ended.

What this settles

Which gives a group the same anatomy a person has, and the same clock. The seats are what it is made of; the arrangement of them is when it is. Nothing has to dissolve for a collective to become a different one — the configuration only has to move.

What it leaves open

How far does a collective’s duty reach?

Raised in this footing and not answered anywhere in the corpus. The moment can be dated; the reach of what it owes cannot, yet.

Not this question

What is a collective made of?

Also in this footing, and a different question. That one answers three seats and one outside force. This one asks when those three are holding still enough to be called one thing.

Also asked as

Where this is worked out

foundation

Theories of the Collective

glossary

moment

Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.

Where this question sits

The anatomy of a collective

What a group is made of, how it decides, what it is bound to and what condition it lives in — held together by the one rule that a collective is never a self. 5 of the 12 here have been worked through; the rest are on the map and not yet walked.

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