Starting now from a manifest difference of temperament. I’m a person of melancholic means and something of a backroom, small-group, peer-to-peer worker, while Robin is famously sanguine, conversational, sociable, public and ¿metropolitan? There are other differences too, including class, but I’ll stay with temperament, which will get me where I’m going more readily than class will.
I’m of a temperament that cannot cease seeing difference, while Robin belongs, I think, to the (larger? I think so) body of people who resonate with (hunger for?) alikeness. What ‘we’ need, I think, is a way of knowing and organising that embraces both these kinds of life; and many other potentials for fragmentation too, rendering them as effective, *living*, generative capacity: in making a *living* economy.
As an ‘ordinary working person’ - euphemistic, populist code for ‘working class’, in many circles I’ve moved in these past decades - I’ve always been concerned with the skill, knowledge and creativity of ordinary working people. But as a melancholic and a participant-historian of professional-managerial class practice, it seems obvious these are not to be taken for granted, as reified qualities of ‘people’ per se.
We certainly can *investigate* skills, knowledges and capabilities in organising the landscape of knowing and capability, and assemble accounts of generations of activist lives in diverse fields; and identify RoPs in diverse practices and formations; and invest these in patterns, and mobilise them. But I would say that this is far more ‘plural’ than any individual person tends to engage with in an ‘ordinary’ life, and to develop capability in (aka rigour).
Humans tend in the main to regard the world as being like themselves, and to project alikeness . . unsurprisingly, we’re wired that way! (Maturana and Varela named this bubble-quality of perception, *autopoeisis* \[Maturana & Varela xxx].) But there is no ‘centre’; no person or movement is a centre. We need to know our *entire* story; we are today in an entire historical mess, we must mobilise our entire capability - as it *is*, in its plurality, as free of myths and presumptions and projections as we can manage. The melancholic is blessed and cursed with seeing the differences, without the sentimentality of ‘we’: as if we - whether that’s community or class or humankind or *anthropos* - were not a problem to be resolved, and a hope to be fulfilled: through a dance of practice, through the dance of theory-of-practice, through formaciòn.
As regards the college, and the pattern language, and the foprop frame that underlies the language, this is where the ‘aesthetic’ landscape §3 is fundamental. It’s a perception, a gestalt, that I’ve been chasing for 50 years, since ‘time and motion study’ was flagged up in *Living thinkwork*, and since ‘the personal is political’ became a mantra of feminist socialists. But it’s taken a lifetime to frame.
All my activist life I’ve been aware, as the cultural materialist who I hatched as in the 70s, of being at work in landscape §2 - the cultural landscape, the challenge of formation-forming (formaciòn), the world of the dance of knowing - as distinct from, allied and woven with, the §1 landscape of material means of subsistence and wellbeing: the landscape of the engineer and corporate value-optimiser I was trained as a young man to be. Then quite late in life I found it necessary to develop further personae.
So now, I find I exist as a bunch of camerados that also includes a walker (in the foothills, having lost his grip and fallen off the wagon of career and wage-earning and ordinary professional-managerial class life) and ‘Rogers’ (named for humanist psychologist Carl Rogers) who cultivates and mobilises the ‘unconditional positive regard’ that awaits cultivation in all people (and turns out to be Walker’s longed-for ‘home’). It’s this latecomer Rogers, who holds and cherishes my most adult version of ‘the ordinary working person’ and their extraordinary activist work; and the landscape Rogers tills is ‘the aesthetic’: the common, mundane, *affective*, sub-sapiens and meta-sapiens soil of . . liking and loathing, clinging and annihilating, affiliating and Othering, open-heart and disdain, passion and equanimity. This is the ‘skill’ that can’t be taken for granted in the ordinary working, surviving person; which it is the transformative work of activists to cultivate.
So . . am I descending now into personal life story; is my vision of pattern language and deeper, more difficult understandings and skills, revealing itself as just an ageing person’s commonplace ‘dictionary of everything’?
Not at all. The three landscapes of the foprop frame turn out to be three distinct **modes of materiality**, all of which are inescapably present in practice - in an activist *life*, in the *formation* of an activist life and an activist capability - and are utterly material to liberation, formaciòn, provisioning, the remaking of the mode of production: the survival and the leaving, in deep time and not before time, of the anthropocene, the colonial-capitalist commodity-enclosed economy, and the new-born, deeply risky, golemic.
Inhabiting the *three* landscapes is extraordinarily hard work, and the aesthetic landscape is the hardest, being pitched on the always-fleeting **cusp** of the preconscious. But it’s the one that the activist can’t do without: her own perception of what pushes her own buttons depends on it (and thus her resilience and equanimity), as also does her awareness of what pushes the buttons of the others in whose lives the possibility of change lies (and thus her moderate and skilful capability in doing just that). Knowing the relations of production (and *altered* RoPs) of ‘the aesthetic’ is fundamental. Nothing could be more apparent in the times of Trumpism and Brexit, counter-terrorism and #blacklives, Fridays for Future and Facebook.
The aesthetic is the landscape of moment-to-moment reproduction of * intentional and contextual Self*, heart-mind - the tendency to affiliation, perception, intention, attention: in-the-body, between the preconscious and conscious awareness, in a continuously and inescapably present, wild, untrammelled, primal, churning ocean of emotion. It may be that the life of a melancholic - the life-struggle of Walker to find paths and map terrain, survive and thrive, make provision and arrive home - brings this to prominence. But this is not ad hominem stuff, mere biographical circumstance. What’s at stake is the place of such insights within the pattern of an *entire* fabric of liberation, and the formaciòn of an entire, necessary, aware *plurality* of radical formations and activist lives.
For the walker with melancholic means, the skill, knowledge and creativity of ordinary working people is not to be taken for granted. He can’t avoid seeing the absurd dominance of consumerist patterns of living in ‘the household’ of Robin’s four-economy schema of post-Fordist new economy - long entrenched, since Fordism kicked in on the coat-tails of the Belle èpoque and the Progressive era \[Perez 2017 [Beyond the tech revolution], Figure 1, p.5]. Likewise, the extractive/supremacist aesthetic in the colonial mode \[van Zwanenberg xxx] and in the concurrent emergence of capital as a hegemonic mode (via, among other things, the freedom and autonomy of petty commodity *trade* in urban guildsmen and rural yeomen) after the collapse of the regime of feudal obligation under the resistance of ‘small’ and ‘large’ peasants.
Such patterns of acquisitiveness, concentration of power and dominance don’t come out of the sky, and mysteriously possess some people, who then become a class. Classes and systems of exploitation and subordination are *relationships*, and ‘ordinary people’ - let’s say, the ‘victorious’ peasants in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, on their way unwittingly to becoming ‘victorious’ free-thinker, free-trader Puritans in the Civil War against Royalists - are culpable for what becomes dominant, even if not in the same way that hegemonic classes are.
An idealist can skip into some fantasy of an ‘idea’ or ‘value’ that somehow arrives - or skip into ‘spirituality’, or even ‘spirit’ - but materialists must account for the ongoing presence and cultivation of such patterns of wanting and affiliating in the ‘ordinary’ member of the species.
In her account of lost coop-consciousness among black Americans, Jessica Gordon Nembhard notes how we can be duped, bullied and driven into forgetting how to be generous and cooperative, and how to *name* it, tell the story of it, perceive ourselves as being alive within it, do the dance of it. These traits have to be *intended*, and continuously *produced*; historically. It’s perfectly possible - as Nembhard illustrates - for them to become residual under the force of a hegemonic organisation of material stuff, insights and labour powers, and feeling: a mode of material-cultural-aesthetic production. Thus, the Faculty of care work in the college: the collection of schools that steward the commons of patterns in the §3 aesthetic landscape.
--- Next : Fragmenting in the mutual sector - Six Rs