**Notes on code and the expansion of sensibility - The digital as a hybrid material-cultural and cultural-aesthetic landscape** ‘The Golemic’ (see Provisioning - The scope of material stuff above, §1 landscape) is a particularly pivotal field within the dance of knowing and capability, and warrants a couple of notes here, given the centrality of the digital in Robin’s perspective on possibilities for a living economy (a post-post Fordist period? \[Murray, Gilbert & Goffin 2014 xxx].
First, there’s the place of *formalisation* in the dance of knowing, and its important relationship with the material landscape, §1; and second, there’s the question of the particular rigour that attaches to *code* (software code), which connects the labour-power/labour-process perspective with the aesthetic landscape §3.
Over 35 years’ engagement I’ve come to see *the digital* as a radically new historical form of materiality, bringing its own particular relations of production.
This kind of materiality is constituted *by writing* - that is, as production in the **§2 cultural landscape**, under the distinctive but extremist rigour of radical formalisation - of *scripts* and (software) *code*. Particular kinds of machines organised by code - popularly ‘computers’, or quaintly and abstractly, Turing machines - enable the construction of radically extended material systems of self-acting digital machinery.
These may do actual §1 material landscape heavy lifting - getting a helicopter aloft and keeping it there, controlling traffic flow across a rail network, picking orders in a warehouse the size of a football field, cutting three inches of metal - through . . - digital media and digital networks - infrastructures of electro-mechanical input and output devices and transport machinery - an emergent ‘internet of things’ and - capabilities lumped together as ‘AI’, such as pattern recognition in ‘wild’ - that is, otherwise incomprehensible, chaotic - ‘Big’ corpora of scraped digital data.
These are developments of historic significance, much explored since the cultural studies ’cyborg’ debates of the 80s and 90s for example; but with regard to class power and history-making this is much less well trodden.
> However, see:
> - Wark 2020, Vectoralist interview, Stir to Action pdf 
> - Griffiths 2020, Kim Moody's 'rank-&-file strategy on new terrain webpage
> - Bastian 2006, Haraway's lost cyborg and the possibilities of transversalism, *Signs - Journal of Women in Culture and Society*, Volume 31, Number 4 (Summer 2006), 1227-1049 pdf
**Code, the artificial and constructions of conviviality** With code - extremely formalised conceptualisation - we’re into the construction of symbol-machines (a long-standing aspiration for rule-based cultures such as law and, from the C15, the Christian Church (Illich/Cayley 2005).
In the 70s, his *Deschooling society* and *Tools for conviviality* brought me to a participant awareness of radical professionalism, as a historical movement of baby-boomers.
With ‘the golemic’ we’re into gross material machinery. So: writing - a practice of the cultural landscape, §2 - now can organise and direct large and complex dynamic constellations of material stuff, in the §1 material landscape.
It does seem to me that this is a historically *new* capability, and not simply an epiphenomenon of the latest marque of capitalism . . although of course The Capitalisms are hard at work attempting to domesticate the digital, in the present wave of ‘creative destruction’ in the emergent techno-economic paradigm: “move fast, and break things”.
**The aesthetics of the digital** Capability in the digital realm now has moved well beyond Herb Simon’s early post-Fordist perception of ‘the Artificial’ \[Simon, ‘sciences of the artificial’ xxx] and, to put an appropriately emotive aesthetic edge on this, we can think of this still-emergent terrain as *‘the Golemic’*. Golems in mythology - notably the Golem of Prague - are beings of clay that are rendered animated and forceful, but muscle-headed, by placing in their mouth a scroll of religious text (classically, the Torah). The challenge of creating tools **of this kind, for conviviality**, is a radically new one, and an entire post-Fordist repertoire of technics, structures of feeling and cultural formations associated with this is emergent (and contested).
In recent years, for example, I’ve been hanging-out in participant-observer mode, in free-software, P2P (peer-to-peer), geek circles, and I observe an anarcho-libertarian structure of feeling which is not at all easily aligned with the *associationist socialist* structures of feeling that underlie the kind of tradition that I recognise Robin and myself to have been working within for 50 years. There is urgently radical stuff here that spans the material, cultural and aesthetic landscapes and rigours . . all grist for the college mill!
I’m not speaking here of the political economy of *digital goods*, and the problematic (contradictory, post-Fordist, sure-to-fail) attempt to enforce enclosure and commoditisation on digital media. This is a matter for the §1 material landscape and the Faculty of subsistence work. I’m speaking more specifically of the *§3 aesthetic affiliations* of cultural formations that invest identity in digital means.
**The aesthetics of knowing in general** With Rigours, plural - the ‘look and feel’ of the disciplined or undisciplined relationship that a practice has with its objects, in the dance of knowing - we’re into *structures of feeling*: that is, concerns of landscape §3, the aesthetic landscape. Thus, while *the form of formations* - the organisation of labour power, as a weave of practices - is central in the §2 landscape of the dance of knowing, the labour powers themselves (as capacity for actual **performances**) are constituted in the §3 aesthetic landscape, as capacities of valueing and commiting, affiliating and discriminating, recognising and naming, directing attention and mobilising of self-discipline.
The curriculum of the Faculty of formaciòn work weaves together threads in both landscapes. This is unsurprising: ‘culture’ in general usage is a word that invokes both . .
- the explicit, aware **organisation of collective practices**, of understanding the world, and communicating and mobilising understandings (which is the way in which I am here specialising ‘culture': to signify *labour power*) and also
- *the aesthetics* of practice: **the ‘feel’ and the impulse that arises**, to do things *this* way or *this other way*; the feel people have about what ‘we’ are and cannot abide; and do and *never* do; and want and aspire to and cleave to and dread; to dreams and devils, what is beautiful and alive, and what is diabolical and deadly; and which of these kinds of actions we will take, and what the power is that we have to choose this.
Throughout the modern era there has been a claim - a forcefully mobilised mythology - that formalisation and codification are forms of knowing that are 'neutral' and 'simply objective', implying free of valueing and of emotive determinations. But thankfully, with the extreme physicalised forms taken now by code, and the manifest aesthetics of sheer ('simple') force embedded in large-scale algorithmic machines, there should now be no mistaking that the entire field of plural rigours in the dance of knowing - the base curriculum of the Faculty of formaciòn - is intimately woven with the aesthetic field of landscape §3, of value(ing) and of the Faculty of care work.
--- Finally in this section: Schools in the faculty of formaciòn work