**Rigours, plural - Meta-rigour and choreography** Each quadrant of the dance schema is home to numerous modes of rigour, appropriate to - the kind of engagement (left-side object/right-side subject) - the mode of action (below the line in-the-body, above the line in-language) and - the material particularity of the ‘stuff’ being engaged.
Dance of knowing - Evolved
For example . .
**The conceptualising quadrant** runs from - disciplined speaking using rigorously curated vocabularies (and hopefully, their underpinning ontologies), through - a limited degree of schematising and formalising (as with pattern language, below), through - ‘hard, quants’ methodology such as the quantitative-experimental, ‘evidence-based’ discipline (or fetish) that is generally taken to characterise ‘real science’; into - domains of highly abstracted and formalised code: mathematics, formal logic, software code.
At the extreme, and as a prominent current cultural norm, the attention and enthusiasm given to translations into the formal domains is never matched by attention to the skills and genres of **translation back out again**, into ‘everyday language’ and ontology; thus these highly valued (over-valued) rigours are far more limited than they typically are treated as being
**The storytelling quadrant** runs from - undisciplined gossip, where rigour is minimal and highly informal, resting in ‘trust’ and senses of ‘authenticity’ or a loose sense and emotionally manipulable of plausibility; through - skilled storytelling - for example, by bards or griots - within traditions of literary, historical, mythological or folk genre. Also, novels or short fiction; into - journalism (news from elsewhere) of more and less rigorous kinds; into - insightful dramatic composition and skilful drama production, on one hand, and, on the other - poetry; and ultimately, into - historical and strategic narrative (also news from elsewhere) founded in firm conceptualisations rather than rhetorical flows whose terms skip from one meaning to another in a button-pushing play of memes.
**The genre quadrant** contains - the ‘how we do things around here’ that ‘everybody’ knows (so commonplace no-one speaks about it until it is violated) - shared habit and regularly frequented venues (mobilised and exploited in families, in informal communities; also exploited in Madison Avenue's market-targeted segments of population and in 'nudge economics', and in psyops, large-scale bombing raids and ethnic cleansing); running through - explicit and often mandatory norms and forms (in formal organisations - which are never the *actual* relations of how stuff gets done, but rather, formal grounds of formal legitimacy and approval), and into - durable institutions that are cemented by (or constituted as) substantial infrastructures of material resource, and thus as durable extensive *powers*.
The identification of actual genre - as distinct from commonplace stories about *professed genre* and community myth - is an extremely skilful business, the province of ethnographers and ethnomethodologists; and great organisers.
**The skill quadrant** runs across direct, in-the-moment relations with all sorts of material stuff: from
- manual craft skill - generally mediated by small-scale, human-powered, hands-on tools), through
- the handling and curating of historical or current documents to maintain them in useable and really-useful constellations; through
- ‘operational’ relationships with extended material systems (generally mediated by extended machineries of tools); right down into
- skill with one’s own body (as in Olympic gymnasts for example, and people living skilfully with physical disability) and finally into
- the skilful handling (in-here, now) of ‘the feeling of what happens’ \[Damasio xxx] in the formation and mobilising of affect and intention; this is the skill-territory of landscape §3.
**'Skill' is basic . .** It’s notable that ‘skill’ somehow seems to be the root word for all modes of rigour. It frequently can refer to any of them. In the dhamma frame of buddhism, the central principle is skilful awareness and response. Struggles of deskilling and reskilling have been the foundation of ‘labour process’ politics in the baby-boomer generation.
The etymology of skill seems to be connected with doing things ‘well’, and with common *weal*. Tradition and community (thus also, story and genre) are always a condition of ‘skill’; skill is never a simply individual capacity. A close-weave ecology of skill and rigorous conceptualisation is somewhat less commonplace; there often can be a stubborn resistance to 'talking about' skilful practice, as distinct from practising it, demonstrating it. This makes sense, but is generally overdone; skilful conceptualisation is critical, 'there is nothing so practical as a good theory'.
**Multiple rigours and the rigour of the dance** The dance-of-knowing schema thus furnishes a mapping-space for multiple and distinct ’rigours’. The crucial thing about the schema, though, is that it recognises that no practice of knowing and organising is in fact conducted without there being a dance, into and out of and across the quadrants, above- and below-the-line, left-side and right-side; and that there is then also a pivotal family of ‘meta-rigours’ to do with the skilful performing and **choreographing** of *the dance*.
These choreographic capabilities - in-and-out of the quadrants and the plural rigours - are complex, and I would say they tend to be quite rare: a formation (or a person) is rather likely to make a home in one or other quadrant: “every carpenter thinks that wood is the greatest thing”; equally, a person whose familiar tool is a hammer may treat everything as if it were a nail.
Very many people love to be in the storytelling quadrant (in a pretty slack, low-rigour kind of way); we certainly are narrative animals, there is always ‘something ongoing’ that invites story-making and -sharing (not to say, *papanca*: mental proliferation; less generously, 'running off at the mouth;, or verbal diarrhoea). It’s my view that these insights and choreographic principles of the dance of knowing are pivotal in the construction and conduct of any skilful, systematic practice of formaciòn.
Skill in the dance of knowing is central for any practice of skilfully producing well-organised, well-understood activist formations, with well-founded and skilfully mobilised understandings and skills. Notably . .
- Rigorous (disciplined, aesthetically defined, well-moderated) *conceptualising*; including the legitimate reach into (and the common obligation to furnish a return *back-from*) licensed ‘geek domains’ of nicely-moderated , grounded and justifiable formalisation and codification;
- Full-scope, multivocal, time- and place-spanning *narrative* (and narrative traditions); well-domesticated and licensed memes, tropes grounded in aware (if not explicit) ontology. No sophistry, no gossip, no *papanca*; no craic, no viral memes, no slavish fashion;
- Well-rehearsed *genres* and traditions of genre, with recognised venues and participation; rigorously legitimated and transparently governed institutions; and
- Vernacular *skills*; finely tuned working relationships with well-selected and -organised systems of material means (‘tools’, material infrastructures, media, physical stuff, human and non-human bodies).
A college of activist literacy must teach these; and must *do* (perform, instantiate, demonstrate) these, and be *organised* to do them, well. The college is fundamentally the walk, not simply the talk; the ‘hidden’ curriculum is primary. Some of the schools of the college are especially important in reflexively furnishing and stewarding these capabilities *within* the college . . *Digital means*, for example; or *Pattern langage(ing)*, or *Value(ing), contribution and livelihood*, or *Pluriverse*.
The literacy of this dance is held in the pattern families that are stewarded by the schools in the Faculty of formacion work . . see below. >Add link xxx
**Curious features of code** The formalised rigour of code and formal machine-performable scripts (as software code, as algorithm) is a particularly powerful - and problematic - feature of the dance of knowing in the present century. The cultural landscape §2 has acquired enormously and newly powerful means of determining the **material** landscape §1. This warrants a specific note, following.
Examining this, we also may highlight the way in which dealing with matters of rigour - which are central in the §2 cultural landscape of knowing and capability - lifts us out of the cultural landscape, and into the §3 **aesthetic** landsape.
--- Next: Notes on code