For 50 years my ‘thing’ has been knowledge - which is to say, the *production* of knowledges and radical alternative knowledges; that is, the production of *modes and practices of knowing*, aka the production of *labour power* and formations of labour power . . as a (defining) dimension of **cultural production**.
I’ve been engaged, for example, in action in-and-against the professional-managerial class, in action research and operational research, emergence of ‘the knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge intensive business services’, the (participatory) design of digitally-based work-infrastructures, and the balance between fiat (the force of objects, notably the force of ‘technologies’, but the force of media too) and the force of poetics and vision. This is a ‘cultural’ materialism.
Robin’s thing, on the other hand, has included hands-on trading and coop formation, the weaving of communities in supply chains, the production and mobilising of alternative institutions in-and-against the State, and the provision of means of subsistence: aka ‘economics’.
With my background, I see pattern language(ing) as a necessary basis for a college of capability in doing Robin’s kind of thing, and I see a contrast that may only be superficial, but which people may be inclined to take as essential, between this and the narrative form that is so appealing in Robin’s accounts of new economy - as, for example, in *Danger and opportunity*. My experience is that it’s easy and common for real differences of commitment and real gulfs of affiliation to develop around this somewhat slack perception. Thus the attention here, below.
**Pattern and narrative - A dance** A critical thing to note then about pattern language(ing) - a fundamentally and rigorously *conceptualising* mode - is that it embraces and systematically *includes* (within its dance) situational storytelling, history-stories, investigative journalism, travel writing, local colour, collective biography: modes on the right-side of the dance of knowing schema, and explicit, above-the-line.
A pattern language has a high-level structure comprising discrete elements (the repertoire of ’patterns’) which have a uniform formal-conceptual basis: *this* kind of significant, recurrent problem or contradiction, and *this* form of practice that can resolve it (or perhaps, give it the space to be worked on and worked through into a resolution). This is decidedly ‘on the left’ of the dance-of-knowing schema: an orientation to formally-specified entities, a requirement of explicitness in rigour, of well-founded development of constructs, of *systemic* conceptualising.
However, within each pattern description there’s a reserved element that furnishes a container for stories: exemplars and historical cases, also research studies and prior evolving conceptualisations. In other words, when ‘a pattern’ is being developed and its description articulated, within it there is an element - a container - that systematically *prompts* for ‘news from elsewhere’: from other times - history, experience, heritage, evolved gracefulness (naturalness? artfulness?) in everyday life; from other places with other versions of supposedly ‘universal’ elements - other materials, cultures, labour organisation - with their own conditions, with subtended implications & consequences, with their own affiliations and resonances with other patterns within the evolving pattern language.
The thing about a well-formed pattern in Alexander-style pattern language is that it is utterly *contexted*. Thus also, utterly open to weaving and to poetic mobilisation, in resonance, in-process, in performance, in-situ, in a now-being-woven *fabric*.
This is precisely, I think, what also gives the appeal and power to the narrative-story, which Robin so often deployed, along with the case study. A difference lies on the surface, in the proforma container that frames ‘a pattern’ and might superficially make the whole venture look somewhat mechanical. The proforma serves to make context explicit and necessary in pattern language, while it may remain tacit and accidental in storytelling.
A pattern language can be seen as a ‘grounded theory’ form \[Star xxxx, Strauss xxxx]: case-evolved, and deployed in a bounded-contextualised way. In a sense, a pattern language constitutes a library of case studies (just as ‘grounded’ theory always has its founding instances to-hand). But when a particular set of ‘terms’ (patterns) are assembled in Alexander pattern language - to address a particular working challenge, the design of a particular nexus of practices - what is immediately to-hand, ‘on top’ of the selected body of descriptions and references, is a set of contextualised-descriptions - the patterns' **names** and lead paragraphs - which can be ‘sung’ - in a ‘poetic’ or ‘choral’ dialectic rather than a mechanical, Lego-fashion act of assembly - into a composite context reading, and a composite ‘recommendation’ or ‘invitation’ for a performance of a newly (re)constituted practice.
It’s all a bit Whitmanesque. It’s this kind of singable quality-in-use that makes the collection of patterns worthy of the description: ‘a language’.
The combination, in pattern language, of formalisation and poetic singing, proformas and history-stories - left-side and right-side modes in the dance of knowing - is an unusual and distinctive one; and a powerful and necessary one, for theory-of-practice (indeed, for an adequate practice of knowing *per se*).
Pattern language is a *design* approach; it originated in architectural practice. Design - as distinct from just problem solving - involves zooming out and zooming in, layering, a set of structural determinants, multiple metaphors and perspectives, some analytical-systemising; also some deconstructing and constructivist assemblage, some ‘jouissance’; sometimes fluidising, sometimes setting in concrete. It is, precisely, a **dance**, within the space of the dance-of-knowing schema.
But I think a majority of people are not designers. I would say most are narrative people most of the time: running on memes (rather than constructs), precedents and norms (rather than visionary imaginations), vignettes (rather than systemic maps); on actors and scenes seen as enduring rather than what is emergent (or might be made emergent: making ‘solid’ what is ‘air’). The everyday life of a species such as ours runs (necessarily - we’re wired that way) on a narrative surface of reified, familiarised categories, formations and inhabited forms; while - in contrast - design mobilises analytic, genetic models of dominant and subordinate processes, multiple determinations (the polyvalency of ‘boundary objects’); of dynamics in contradiction, of overdetermined ‘resolutions’, of struggles and metamorphoses, balances of varying - even incommensurable - forces.
Design is a distinctly odd, challenging, counter-intuitive kind of thing to do.
**Jobbing toolkits? Historical particularity!** It needs to be remembered that Robin also worked in ‘design’ mode, notably during the period when he wrote one of his most characteristic and justifiably admired ’story’ pieces: *Danger and opportunity - Crisis and the new social economy*. Around that time he worked at The Design Centre, and co-authored two ‘design toolkit’ collections of ‘methods’: *Social venturing* \[Murray et al xxx 2009] and *The open book of social innovation* \[Murray et al xxx 2010]. These are distinctly over towards the left-side of the ‘dance’ schema and have a design-patternish form; but rather in the nature of the discrete, modular ‘unit operations’ of chemical engineering design - somewhat Lego-like - rather than the ‘sung-together’ form of Alexander pattern language?
Two qualities these collections lack are: - an overarching conceptual-analytical *frame* (the framing of both collections is ad hoc and ‘common-sensical’, thus they remain toolkits rather than theories - even ‘grounded’ theories) and - the *analytical core* of problem/contradiction and resolution, specified in terms of *relations of production*.
In this period, the closest Robin comes to Alexander-style patterns, I think, is in his ‘ten principles’ of new economy \[DaO 2009 xxx], each of which is a compact narrative-story of innovative economic practice. I suspect that each of these ten stories might quite easily be translated into a foprop pattern, around a core of altered relations of production (see my exploration of this above, on ‘Pattern language(ing) as a dance of knowing’). As far as I know Robin didn’t extend this collection of story-form descriptions of ‘principles’ to create a library, and these ten bear a rather arbitrary relationship to the long lists of ‘methods and tools’ (in *The open book of social innovation*, 527 of them) that were developed around the same time.
These method catalogues need to be contrasted, for example, with the classically Marxian investigation of the particularity of rent and ‘modern landed property’ that Robin engaged in, in relation to Ricardo and modern economists \[Murray 1977, 1978]. This involved what might seem to be the most arcane distinctions between modes: extensive and intensive differential rent. Robin works wonderfully hard at handling “the apparent disjunction between Marx's theoretical categories and the demands of concrete analysis” \[Murray 1977, 101]. He moves from relations of production of rent and value, in Part One of his article, to discussion in Part Two of actual strategies of actual rentiers, and actual contradictions - including contradictions in the ‘structure of feeling’ (the *ontology* of value, land, productivity) - of the strategies of formations of capitalist and rentier actors, attempting to achieve coherent practices and institutions (and profit streams) in particular material terrains. These terrains embrace ‘land’ in the broadest sense, in various politically significant domains including oil and energy, extractive industries - which would today include the enclosure of forests and wild water as well as mining - and real estate.
The tradition Robin is working within here is one in which highly refined and critically acute *conceptualised* accounts of transitions in modes of production (relations of production, contradictory historical economic and political formations) move into narratives of *genre* - class practices and the conflicts of class fractions: rentiers, industrial capitalists, financial capitalists; on specific economic landscapes - and eventually, into accounts of *lives* and structures of feeling: the distinct aesthetics - perceptions, motivations, ontologies, forms of greed and necessity - of . . > a banker class, a merchant class, a petty-commodity class (the guild master/journeyman/apprentice, the yeoman farmer), a rentier-class, an ‘improving’ landed class, a slave-trading and -owning class, a manufacturer class, a clerical-monastic class; the present-day peasant farmer in fairtrade, the cooperator, the fraternal visitor, the commoner
. . and how these aesthetics can manifest in routines, narratives, genres, skillsets; in *altered* routines, narratives, genres, skillsets.
This is a long, painstaking journey, and while it doesn't go all the way from rigorous conceptual 'theory' framing to narratives of class-fraction and class-struggle lives (it's not a history paper, nor an anthropology, let alone, a collective biography) it 'knows' that this is the range that is called for, and models the tendency.
Conceptualising of this kind is essential in becoming able to tell history stories that constitute a *usable* history, and narratives that allow activists to work in-and-against the uneven historical and geographical development of weaves of forces and weaves of relations of production. It’s at the heart of the particularity *that matters* in intentional, activist, historical change, and active - productive - relationships with the dominant, emergent and residual *formations* in the cultural and economic landscape.
Conceptualisation of this kind is at the heart of the foprop pattern language; which is at the heart of the college of formaciòn that I think is warranted, implied and invited by richly particularistic practice like Robin’s.
**Narrative, practicality and historical traction** So, how is it that *narrative* - rather than systematic conceptualisation - steps so readily into the place of *particularity*, in a commonplace understanding of the way someone like Robin works?
I think maybe the work that narrative accounts primarily do in activist formacion - over on the right-side of the ‘dance’ schema - is **inspiration** . .
> Somebody *did* it already . . They did it under these motivations, in these circumstances, in these communities, with these means . . We don’t have to systematically vision or design, we can imitate, *resonate*, run on memes, stand in someone’s shoes, do it on empathy (or sentimentality) rather than cognition and conceptualisation . . be bullish, willfully ignore the probability of failure because of the systemic, manifold, particular construction of situations . . and claim that ‘we’ (who?) did it before and therefore can do ‘it’ (what?) again. And once embarked and fired-up with the story of ‘we’ that we have adopted, or which we have allowed to claim us, we can be inventive and improvisatory ‘in the field’ or on the journey . .
It needs noting, though, that inspirational, well-figured improvisation in jazz, or dance, or theatre, rests on an awful lot of rehearsal, and even on bar exercises or scales; and probably, affiliation with a formal or informal ‘school’ of performance practice.
It’s worth looking at what Jessica Gordon Nembhard says in this area. She has a lovely stream of scholarship that constructs a history of solidarity economy in black American culture, demonstrating that, yes, coops are part of black movements, black people have succeeded strikingly with coops and kindred forms of economic organising. It’s a lost history (she adduces secrecy under the threat of violence, in the Jim Crow era, and concealment under McCarthyite persecution) which she narrates in black community settings, eliciting surprised responses: Oh, so that’s what my uncles and aunts were doing, what the grandparents and great-grandparents were about. I thought coops were something just white people did!
Nembhard, a wonderfully particularistic roots researcher (I’m reminded of EP Thompson, who I’ve known for longer, and who writes of my own working-class making) is emphatic around diversity and the depth of change, which she speaks of in terms of Intersections of repressive and destructive life-situation . . black, brown, poor, migrant, enslaved, women, LGBTQ+. Humanness, she says, > . . is about *all the intersections*. We have to figure out how our economics can provide dignity for *all* those intersections. We *can* have economic democracy and economic justice for everybody - but we have to be very *deliberate* about it . . . It’s not just about diversity and inclusion, that doesn’t take us far enough . . . We have to really examine ourselves, so that we don’t bring that baggage . . \[We need to be aware of] all the isms and whatever.” \[Nembhard xxx, my italics]
Here’s a call for deep aesthetic perception and intention in everyday actions and affiliations. When you dismantle the dominant order, you have to be aware of “all the isms and whatever” or you just reproduce the old aesthetic order, and end up being disrespectful (without mutuality, without regard, blind, disdainful, supremacist) toward the life of some groups.
Nembhard pitches the ‘deliberateness’, in her storytelling (and in conversational exchanges around the stories), in terms of ‘groups’, and in terms of persistent everyday labour and vigilance, removing “all the isms and whatever” and *keeping* them removed (replaced). There’s a widely used rhetorical frame here, of **social justice**. It doesn’t amount, though, to a conceptualisation of classes and formations, and of *relations of production* dominant, residual and emergent. It’s that additional explicitness and particularity, and the consequent capacity for theorisation of **dual power** established and maintained through epochal historical transitions, that can be furnished by a pattern language (with stories in its containers) as distinct from just (!) a committed practice of storytelling, and a giving back of the/a history of ‘a people’: an affiliative, resonating we.
Likewise with case study, a favoured mode of Robin’s (which includes for example his ‘ten principles’ in DaO). Phenomena such as uneven development, multiple determinations and contradictions (consequently, struggles between formations), conjunctures, modes of production, classes and cultural and aesthetic formations, need not only not just *instantiating* and putting in the on-stage spotlight, in richly contextualised, fine-grained or poetically voiced stories, but also conceptualising - through families of patterns around altered *relations* of production (powers) and prefigurative weaves of *forces* of production (the everyday practices of formations). This constitutes the particularity of insight for organising properly radical formations.
Mobilising a pattern language furnishes capacity to weave fabric, within which are multiple, distinct, locations, holding distinct resources, on distinct lifelines: many journeyings . . *even among people in ‘the same’ place and ‘the same’ situation*. Pattern language can be used to do the same work as narrative: news from elsewhere, encouragement, vision, reanimation of ‘our’ tradition of making and of a historical ‘we’; solidarity, alignment, imaginative and grounded construction of pluriverse, ‘intersectionality’. But pattern language, as rigorous conceptualisation, can be organised and populated to give historical *traction* - historical context - to both narrative and poetry, which they do not otherwise necessarily carry.
On the right-side of the dance-of-knowing schema, it’s important to not stay focused on the explicit modes ‘above the line’. The tacit modes below the line are pivotal: the college is more about **genre** and the (re)production and cyborg hybridising of genres, than storytelling. Thus for example, Robin’s practice of ‘networking’ in fairtrade does the work of skilful storytelling - like his and Nembhard’s (and EP Thompson’s, and Raymond Williams’s; etcetera) - but does it by furnishing **direct participatory experience** ‘now’ rather than storytelling ‘elsewhere’.
Making it *lived* and *directly* mutual in this way (rather than just empathic) changes the character of ‘story’. It enables direct perception of and affiliation with **conditions** . . of life, of ‘elsewhere’; of unevenness in development and perception and commitment, mutuality of need and desire, compassion and hardship, danger and opportunity . . of the plural, manifold, situationally differing weaves of mutual-sector motivation and commitment: the ‘six Rs’ of . . - rescue and respite - resistance - reporting and recording - re-weaving of life-fabric - reparation and reconciliation for generations of harm; and - revolution and regime change and re-ontologising.
Such direct furnishing of mutuality in lived practice is the basis of the college school of Festival and visiting. Other modes within the dance of knowing (landscape §2, labour power), other landscapes of material engagement (§1 means of subsistence, §3 affiliations and the production of the heart-mind), and other (altered) relations of production are foundations for other families of pattern, and thus other college faculties and schools.