Here I’ll sketch the schools of subsistence work: the pattern families within the foprop frame that engage the provisioning of material means of subsistence and wellbeing: the real economy. The families are framed on the basis of various kinds of relationships with stuff of various kinds.
Three broad groupings of practical relationships in the real economy
This is a frame of material and machine *forms*, organisations of (non-living and living) material that operate with the ‘suchness’ of material stuff: the objective force of material ecologies, their quality of *fiat*, not determined by, or open to, argumentation and preference.
Stuff does what it is (internally and externally, intentionally or intrinsically) organised to do; it doesn’t debate the matter, or interpret. Stuff is a force in the world. In the landscape of material stuff - the field of subsistence work, real economy - this is what we must engage with and, in appropriate ways, 'dance' with. In its own ways, it is 'alive'. Being able to skilfully do this dancing is at the heart of a Living economy.
Aesthetics - preferences and intentions, prejudices and wants, human wilfulness, disparate visions - are of course tacitly at work, in an ecology of human-organised or human-inflected material stuff. Intersections with the §3 Aesthetic landscape are inevitably at work in constituting the organisation of the §1 Material landscape, mobilised and modulated by (aesthetic) *forces* of affiliation (and Othering), perception (and wilful blinkers), attention (and laziness) and intention (and gut-force). And so on.
Sometimes this is manifestly, powerfully and dangerously so, as in the fields of Transgressive and cyborg means.
The same kind of interweaving across landscapes is true also of the §2 Cultural landscape. None of the constellations of stuff invoked in the structure-map above operates, in practice, without being mediated in cultural and economic *formations*.
> Nevertheless, stuff is stuff - animal, vegetable or mineral - and handling it wisely and successfully depends very much on the kind of stuff it is. Thence, ontology . .
Here is a page on 'ontologising', and why it's necessary to get into this kind of 'philosophical' stuuf when dealing with the real economy. Ontologising
--- Arising from this ontological reframing, I see three broad groupings of relationships - schools, within a **Faculty of subsistence work**, in a college of activist literacy - each of which attends to a different kind of relationship with material stuff: - Primary attention in the real economy - Transgressive and cyborg means - Machineries of intermediation
DOT FROM preview-next-diagram