**Particularity, plurality and the production of scope** **Talking to Robin** Since he died I've spent a lot of time ‘talking to’ Robin - more than in thirty years. In the spring of 2016 I contacted Robin because I found myself engaging, with others of my baby-boomer generation, in the production of legacy, and felt a powerful need for his present-day perspective as an older comrade who spanned a little further back: into the May Day Manifesto, new Left generation of the 60s, when I was still in school. By the time we exchanged mails again, late 2016, I had begun hatching the idea of a ‘college of conviviality’ \[Illich xxx] which would steward activist legacy and cultivate the capability of cultivating *‘tools for conviviality’*; and was needing his perspective (along with Stephen Yeo’s, as a May Day peer of Robin’s, and an ex-President of Ruskin College) on the need for and nature of such a thing. Thus, formacion was the root of my most recent engagement with Robin.
I’ve become very aware of his particularity as a person (as well as his *concern with* particularity as a practitioner-theorist of economic transformation) and, by the same token, of some substantial differences between myself and him. We both are lifelong, associationist-socialist, labour-process, in-and-against post-Fordism organisers; but we have differing visions and, over thirty years, have had differing practical-institutional commitments: we’ve been in different activist bubbles or silos. In closing this chapter I need to say some things deriving from such manifest plurality, in the construction of a college of activist literacy.
Robin and I didn’t succeed in having that conversation, so . . here I am, myself working on the design of a college as a direct, empathic, respectful engagement with Robin’s practice: his understanding and his conduct of formacion.
It seems to me such matters are central in the politics that needs to be conducted from here on: a politics of skilfully cultivated and constructed, intentional **pluriverse** \[Pluriverse: Escobar 2015, 2018 xxx: “ . . > from the concept of the pluriverse one can raise questions about the re-constitution of the plurality of European worlds, away from the dominant version of Euromodernity, and envision perhaps ‘degrowing into a pluriverse . .’.
The (Fordist-modernist) days of universalism are gone. And fragmentation is so easy to fall into, such a comfortable, heads-down, hard-working, embattled, lazy bubble of a place.
I can take two starting points. One is a manifest difference of temperament. I’m a person of melancholic means and something of a ‘backroom’ worker, while Robin is famously and wonderfully sanguine, sociable-conversational and public.
The other starting point is our tendencies in the dance of knowing, me towards the left (object-oriented) side - systematised constructs, systemic analysis and design, schemas and maps, tools, skills - and Robin towards the right (subject-oriented) side: historical storytelling and ‘cases’, genres of collaboration and commerce, cooperatives, weaving of communities. Rather than being purely personal differences, I mean to take these as instances of ways in which fragmentation can arise, even across formations that mean to be solidaristic, and have goodwill towards each other.
Over the 30 years since Robin and I worked under the same roof, we’ve developed quite distinct associations and perspectives - indeed, life journeys and travelogues - to a point where it shouldn’t be taken for granted that our commitments will in fact mesh in any specific, effective way, beyond a very loose alignment of ‘values’; and ‘values’ are something I’m completely unwilling to place my precious, activist trust in. Espoused values are flabby, I feel: jaw-flapping, idealist (yuk! did we learn *nothing* from Marx?), fatally weak in the face of fiat - material force, material provision, material separation, material organisation. OK, that’s my melancholia kicking in! But also, it’s the systemiser, the engineer-designer; and the activist of rank-&-file skilling-*contra*-deskilling (such an important politics of the early post-Fordist 70s), who asks how practices are *materially* interwoven, and where - in which actual spaces and locations - *value-ings* are coproduced and mobilised, self-consciously and intentionally, skillfully and manifestly, in *actual* aware collaborations. No hand-waving, but graft; Robin’s diligent ‘networking’.
Part of my retained sense of the 80s’ GLC formation - alongside the sense of being part of a formation working experimentally ‘in-&-against the State’ - is that our collaboration under the roof of County Hall (and more broadly, across the regional-state ’metropolitan authorities’, all of which were wiped out by the neoliberal Thatcher national government) was framed by a perceived need to move ‘beyond the fragments’ which, already by the end of the New Left 70s, had become an acknowledged problem \[Wainwright, Rowbotham & Segal 1979 xxx].
It was clearly represented (if not necessarily well handled) in the GLC’s institutional form by the paralleling of our Industry and Employment Group (with its ‘labour’ and labour *process* base) with a Women’s unit, an Ethnic minorities unit and an Equal opportunities unit ::? Hilary: Which unit handled LGBTQ+? xxx::. In principle, at least, intersectionalism was on the agenda, in the face of burgeoning fragmentation. So I want to take Robin and me as a ‘case’ of potential fragmentation/plurality. I don’t feel that the subsequent rise of ‘intersectionalist’, identity-based organising has necessarily improved things; it spins two ways I think, and can consist sometimes of getting entrenched in one or other egoistic fragment of Self, a bubble of ‘me and marginal just like me’ or ‘more marginal than thou’ which is not ultimately solidaristic.
I’ve seen this raised in the trans community, for example \[Lee 2018 xxx https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/no-justice-without-love-why-activism-must-be-more-generous/].
--- In this section I'll start with tendencies in the dance of knowing, which are fundamental in formaciòn - Narrative? Pattern!
Then move to temperament; or rather, structure of feeling . . - Beyond the fragments - The production of plural affiliation - Fragmenting in the mutual sector - Six Rs - Activist practice and the aesthetic landscape
Closing with . . - Schools in the faculty of care work - System map of the aesthetic landscape
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