Here we look at a 'turn to practice' that emerged on the baby-boomers' historical shift, and a specific, powerful and simple-seeming framing of practice in the cultural landscape: 'the generative dance of knowing'.
**A turn to practice - aka cultural materialism** From the start, I was tuned in the 70s to *culture* - that is, to the production and organisation of **labour power**, the totality of capabilities to . . >vision, organise, make, cultivate, nurture, provision, mobilise, steer, etc
. . as distinct from (but in relation to) *economy*: the material provision of means of subsistence and wellbeing.
After a blooding in the global-corporate culture in the chemicals manufacturing sector I left engineering pretty sharpish, and made a home in the humanities, and embraced the cultural-historical Marxian materialism of Raymond Williams which, I sensed, could make it possible to grasp the field of practice that I had left - ’science and technology’ - as a field of *cultural* production, one peculiar kind of organised and organising practice among many: a field, not of ‘knowledge’ but of **knowing**.
I was not mistaken in this, and the centrality of **formations** in the present account, as well as the pivotal notion of ‘structures of feeling’ (more of this below, in the §3 aesthetic landscape), are plenty of reward for that early hunch - which very few others in ‘radical science’ or ‘radical economics’ shared, I think. It was too 'artsy-aesthetic'?
At the same time, in an emerging field which in the 80s and 90s became known as ‘science & technology studies’ (STS), there was a another ‘turn to practice’. And in the 90s, design practice (originally in Scandinavia) and anthropological investigation (originally in US corporate labs) converged in the production of methodologically sophisticated, radical, work- and worker-centred understandings and capabilities, in the field of ‘participatory design’ of IT-based work infrastructures and ‘computer supported cooperative work’.
One way and another, it was clear from the 70s onwards that the altered production of altered work-based understandings and capabilities was on the historical agenda, and that new skills, practical modes, narratives and conceptualisations were being formed, which had a powerful bearing on the production of (material) means of production - and specifically, of digital infrastructures. Of course, it makes sense that this kind of cultural development should be occurring in post-Fordism, as a ‘knowledge based’ form of economy. But it remains somewhat esoteric, geeky or academic (not to mention counter-intuitive and conceptually ‘hard’, much of the time) and its perceptions and intuitions currently aren’t well translated into the aesthetics of activist culture.
This is something that needs to be fixed in the curricular frame of a college of formaciòn. Cutural (and aesthetic) materialism is utterly basic in an adequately developed politics of production.
Over the decades, though, the persistent post-Fordist focus on practices of 'knowing the world into shape' in technological fields also had a counterpart in the knowing of practices of knowing, per se: that is, understanding (and organising) the production of cultural capability - **cultural production**. In conceptualising practices of cultural production we use a mapping of practice proposed by Noam Cook & John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC in the 90s. They call it 'the generative dance of knowing'.
--- Next: Dance of knowing