As a dimension of activist life, alongside the landscapes of §1 material and of §2 labour-power, this is where the rubber hits the road: the §3 aesthetic landscape, where the forces live that shape the commitment and capability, the intention and attention, the perception and affiliation. This is where the activist’s literacy lives, regarding what pushes her buttons (and where her resilience and equanimity are to be found), and what is legitimate in her pushing the buttons of the others in whose lives the possibility of change lies; and what is not legitimate, but rather violation, subordination, supremacy, abuse, trouble-making, hubris.
Life in this landscape needs theory - goodness, how it needs theory, pattern, regularised language - founded in hugely deepened and aware, on-the-hoof literacy, in an era of memes and populisms, fundamentalisms and consumer dreamscapes, industrial global-scale button-pushing thro advertising and media, and a confusion of multiple timelines all simultaneously unravelling and ricochetting: modernism and capitalism-colonisation, the anthropocene and the golemic. Our capabilities in *valuing* are the pivot; the aesthetic landscape is where they are husbanded and breed; the hegemony of exchange-value and anthropos-value is at stake.
This is not a ‘psychologising’ of politics, this is cultural materialism.
As an activist-saboteur of melancholic and intellectual, architectural and dramaturgical means I have - after fifty years - an uncomfortable sense of a myth of ‘activism’, a hegemonic and tunnelled vision of activist structure of feeling, a limited perception of - and mobilising of - activist modes and activist persons: > ‘on the cobbles’, mass action, the pumped-up tension of large first-person peer assemblies, the *craic* on the street, show of hands, passionate impulsive-charismatic invective, occupy the squares, make the city stop, flush the state oppressive machinery from cover: our fiat and their fiat, ‘our’ hot tribal passion and their cold machine-passion.
A bullying or complacent presumption of this kind of ‘we’ - ‘extravertist’ mandatory mateship, a sentimentally and obsessively positive activist ethos - makes us little different than our enemies: still under basically the same primitive relations of emotional production. The revolution will be conducted in the aesthetic landscape; or . . "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
As a quietly passionate and violent, murderously purposeful, readily overwhelmed and thinly skinned, agile and balletic, future-singer and designer-constructor and stiletto-carrying assassin - finding myself profoundly and sickeningly disabled under such ‘hot’ conditions (I shut down, I fold up, I go to pieces, I melt down) - I am in dispute with this, and in pursuit of profound mutuality across profound plurality, multiple capacities for empathy, many regimes of interior resources, skilfully modulated appetites and recovering addictions, many ways of living an activist life under any of the Rs between rescue-succour and revolution-regime change.
I can only see the future as a pluriverse, and the days of ‘universal’ expectation and alliance, recognition and capability, as past, becoming residual. But the modernist-Romantic-extravertist *apassionata* tropes cling to their expiring hegemony.
There is so much work to be done here in the aesthetic landscape - so much emotional earth-moving; and ‘social values’ simply do not have the muscle. Some very muscular and fluid-choreographed practices are needed, some very fluent and well-apprenticed genres; very well-grounded and well-animated pattern language(ing). We - the human species and the non-human species, our grandchildren’s grandchildren, the dispossessed, the global majority - need a transformed mode of production of *affiliation*. It won’t just happen. It needs skilfully cultivating. The skill, knowledge and creativity - and open-heartedness - of ordinary working people is something to make *provision for*, not to presume.
The framing that I’m bringing here - of landscape §3 within the foprop frame, an ontological frame for a pattern language - is the system-thinker’s version (and yes, the melancholic’s version) of Robin’s open-hearted, generous, curiosity and collaborative nous. These are not at odds, but do call for recognition and mutuality; and systematically *generated* mutuality, intentional practices of mutualising, evolving into kin.
What do I finally say here then, about me and Robin? What I am doing here is in no way disrespectful. I love the man, and am deeply sad we were unable to have this conversation. But I’m in no doubt - given my differing, melancholic reality - that his sanguine optimism needs to be set alongside, and recognised and understood alongside, and mobilised alongside . . other temperaments, other formations of the heart-mind; under a regime of ‘practice-and-theory of mind’ that underpins the cultivating of skilful practices of *aware* intention, affiliation, perception, deep time.
This is not an appeal to ‘values’, but an invocation of highly skilled *material* practice: skilful cultivation under generations - recent and ancient - of explicit and tacit guidance (above and below the line, left-side and right-side, fully *danced*), an intention to develop an adult ’ecology’ of perceptual and motivational means, rather than the lurch of gut knowing and infant passion and ‘the people’. In the body: it could not possibly be *more* material - akin to the practice of an Olympic floor-exercise gymnast!
Production and skilfully *altered* production; of intention and affiliation, perception and awareness; within a frame of the inescapably continuous, tacit, preconscious production of self/world/other that enables biography as an experience, and history as a possibility.
Yes, this happens in part at a §2 cultural level - in *conscious* knowing, deliberate organising and capable *communicating*. Yes, this happens in §1 practices of compassionate, generous and skilful material provisioning. But fundamentally it happens in the §3 *liminal* landscape, on the cusp of the preconscious becoming action, and escaping mere habit: what fires-together, wires-together. As with the gymnast . . it happens through offline ‘personal’ rehearsal and skilling, as distinct from (in preparation for) public realtime spontaneity, and the inevitability of hot, button-pushing, uncontrolled herd actions.
Goodness, how political ‘the personal’ needs to become. It’s time to cash that cheque, written 50 years back, in establishing a federated college of conviviality, dual-plural power and profoundly skilful knowing.
--- Finally in this section : Schools in the faculty of care work