write.as

Making a living economy, language(ing) of struggle, writing personally

Sept 13 2024 - Work in progress https://write.as/3f0ubjsgt2jht70f.md. Draft third blog post for _[The Methuselah papers](https://write.as/papers/)_. ## An intention of radical re-ontologising ##  > This is where I was brought up. But I didn’t know it as such until I read a book: EPThompson’s _The making of the English working class_. He was writing in the bottom right-hand corner of the town, at the same time as I was being inducted as a cadet member of the professional-managerial class, at Halifax Technical High School, in the top-left corner. Writing can matter! In an earlier paper [Goodbye universe](https://write.as/hi41jd1pw645d5a0.md "Goodbye universe") I wrote about activist legacy and plurality, and offered a summary of the intentions of the _Methuselah_ narratives. I also asked: what does it mean for an activist to ‘write personally’ as an alternative to organising collectives and directly mobilising cultural, economic and aesthetic formations? So, in this paper I'll briefly gloss each of the elements within this summary of intentions: > To offer beginnings and framings of parallel articulations of threads in a weave of explicit understanding, of how we activists might, beyond fragments, continue to cultivate the collective, mutualised capability to make a living economy, in the commons. I’ll work in reverse order, from the largest and most recalcitrant (_making a living economy_) to the most limited (_offering beginnings and framings_). Throughout, I’ll need to consider how writing ‘personally’ can be regarded as a reasonable kind of engagement under such a span of intentions. How can one person, writing, contribute to evolving plurality and local particularity of practice across regions: in time, in geography? How can an offering by one person contribute to vision and affiliation ‘beyond the fragments’ of activist formations and subcultures? How can a ‘personal’ narrative offer a framing of language that might constitute common cultural and aesthetic ground for joined-up, mutualised action and systemic visioning, across biomes and across the colonial north-south divide? How can a language frame transformation through and for future generations, rather than just reproduce the status quo, or generate churn and _papanca_? What is the power of ‘framing’, and its relations with other powers? Large questions like these – questions of the revolutionary politics of pluriverse – can only be properly responded to through a body of work: the _Methuselah papers_, for example. But we’ll take a pass at them in this early paper in the incipient _Methuselah_ series. ### The South, the North and modernity Some time has passed since writing the [Goodbye universe](https://write.as/hi41jd1pw645d5a0.md "Goodbye universe") paper and the dynamics of the work in hand have brought further visions and communities into view, in a way that bears powerfully on this project of skill and evolution. Since I began to work with frames like the #sevenRs, I’ve been aiming to develop a strong and deep relationship with practices of decoloniality On one hand it has been clear that the US black civil rights movement has been powerfully bearing fruit in the past decade, generating activist formations like [May First Movement Technology](https://mayfirst.coop/ "May First Movement Technology") in the field of digital infrastructure and [Solidarity Economy Principles and Practices](https://solidarityeconomyprinciples.org/about/) in the field of social economy and grassroots economic organising. In recent times I’ve taken guidance and inspiration from both of these in engaging the making of a living economy. On the other hand it’s become manifestly plain that movements and collectives in the global South and from the standpoint of indigeneity are going to be pivotal in what might happen next, both because they are the global (non-white, racialised, colonised) majority with perspectives and capabilities ‘from the other end’ of coloniality than the one inhabited by activists of privilege like me in the global north, and because their needs - in ‘the margins that occupy in the centre’ - for radically re-founded alternatives are profound and immediate matters of day-by-day concern. I noted this for example in [a report](https://geo.coop/articles/report-world-social-forum-2024-kathmandu "a report") from the World Social Forum gathering in Nepal, February 2024, and I observe it in global-South ‘post-development’ formations like [Global Tapestry of Alternatives](https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/introduction "Global Tapestry of Alternatives") and [Pluriverse - A post-development dictionary](https://www.academia.edu/39728210/ "Pluriverse - A post-development dictionary") (also at [University of Columbia Press](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/pluriverse/9788193732984 "Columbia University Press")) which are what took me to the Nepal WSF gathering in the first place. The relationship is between what Vanessa Andreotti (aka de Oliveira) calls _high- and low-intensity struggles_ \[[de Oliveira 2021](https://sources.wiki.foprop.org/vanessa-andreotti.html "de Oliveira"), pp 52-54\]. As an activist in low-intensity struggle, it’s obligatory that I should begin to take proper account of relationship with those in high intensity struggle. > Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021), _Hospicing modernity - Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism_, California: [North Atlantic Books](https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/hospicing-modernity/ "North Atlantic Books"). I’ve seen (and continue to see) the #sevenRs as a way of engaging these matters. Some of the Rs - #rescue, #resistance, #reparation, #regenerative activism - might be seen as particularly implicated in what develops in the the South, while others might be more global-North in their origins and orientations: #reporting, #remaking, #regime change. Thus for example, the latter might warrant a certain caution: more on this perhaps in a later paper. But in recent months a mode of radical self-education and transformation has swum into my view via a 2021 book that proposes a collective practice which I might call eco-psychological self-therapy or **‘ethnotherapy’**, in a way that gives these global-South post-development decolonial orientations a different kind of traction and perspective. The book is Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s : _Hospicing modernity_. There is something very familiar about this practice, rooted as it is in a Latinx liberation tradition that includes Paulo Freire’s [conscientización](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical\\consciousness "conscientización") (Brazilian Portugese: _conscientização_). Freire - himself, following on from Fanon - was part of the aesthetic environment of my own Northern baby-boomer generation in the 70s, developing forms of ‘radical professionalism’ and practices of community development. Likewise the proposals of Ivan Illich around tools for conviviality, deschooling society, and vernacular capability in response to and in opposition to professionalist-statist-corporatist modernity, which were a foundation for the sense that I and my peers inhabited, of needing to struggle ‘in and against the professional-managerial class’. Both these traditions have been touchstones of practice, for me, for more than fifty years now; and of course both are global-south in their origins (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico). Thus they turn out to have been avatars and guardians of the present pivotal significance of decoloniality, post-development and unmodernity. However, the practice that Vanessa de Oliveira promotes in _Hospicing modernity_ couples unmodernity with decoloniality in a way that powerfully and directly challenges and engages forms of activist commitment that my baby-boomer Northern generation have cultivated, which are, precisely, ‘modern’ in both their context and also in many of their intentions. > Paulo Freire [references & downloads](https://sources.wiki.foprop.org/paulo-freire.html "references & downloads") > > Illich [references and downloads](https://sources.wiki.foprop.org/ivan-illich.html "references & downloads") Thus, in _The Methuselah Papers_ it’s necessary to pull a focus on fields in the heart of the modern that seem nevertheless to have some kind of value and significance in progressive aspirations, in relation to the more-than-human, the unmodern and to postdevelopment-degrowth. I’m thinking for example of **design** as a commitment, a capability and a practice, of **digital means** (globally significant now within the activist capabilities of global civil society) and of the radically perverse forms of sociality and prosthesis that have emerged in the past couple of (post-Fordist) generations as **’the Golemic’**. I’m thinking of **writing**, in its relations with other dimensions of collective practice, consciousness and aesthetic formations, and of **‘theory’** as an _organic intellectual_ commitment to going beyond and behind and beneath ‘the obvious’ and the quotidian; thus also, by extension, of both **psychotherapy** and the general limits of ‘talk’’ as a carrier and trigger of insight. I’m thinking of the arch-modern notion of **revolution**, and its relations with evolution, conservation and more-than-human wellbeing. All these dimensions will need attention, inter alia, as this series of papers unfolds; I can make a start here in this present review of intentions. It needs to be noted too that many of these concerns have been safeguarded and fostered in my activist generation by feminisms and that, at least, ‘the new feminist materialism’ resonates strongly with the #foprop framing of these Papers; it began a long time ago, with Donna Haraway’s _Cyborg manifesto_, in the editorial collective of _Radical Science Journal_ (thank you [Bob](https://share.mayfirst.org/s/dS4mHyx9MXyogRZ "Bob") _;-)_. OK, more on these themes in due course (and indeed, later in this paper). Now, to the intentions of a blog series: legitimate aspirations in the work of writing, and possible contributions of writing, as a form of mindful action, within an activist practice in these present profoundly problematic times in species history. ### Intentions – In the commons > make a living economy, in the commons The principle of life conducted in commons seems foundational: as _an economics_ (a way of provisioning for subsistence and wellbeing - ‘the real economy’), as _a politics_ (of dual power, beyond capital and the state, beyond consumerist individualism and the industrial-nonprofit economy of NGO, progressive consultancies, ‘do tanks’, and so on), as as _a lived relationship_ with the planet and the more-than-human, as a generative _generational_ relationship with the grandchildren’s grandchildren. But what ‘the commons’ means (in all these dimensions) is far from widely acknowledged, and inhabited in relatively limited ways. It may mean traditional- indigenous ‘lifestyle’, it may mean just a way of using land, it may mean more or less the same as ‘cooperation’, it may mean a cute tree-hugging fad like permaculture; it generally is not recognised as a powerful practical-political commitment, at once economic, cultural and aesthetic, which is a legitimate decolonial, unmodernising heir to everything that (associationist) socialism used to mean in an earlier generation (including class struggle: ‘the resurgent power of the commons’). > On associationist socialism see Stephen Yeo _[A usable past](http://www.eerpublishing.com/yeo-a-usable-past.html "A usable past")_ . A Useable Past - The History of Association, Cooperation and un-Statist Socialism in 19th and early 20th century Britain. , Volume 2. _A New Life, The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883-1896: Alternatives to State Socialism_. Through the crises of subsistence and wellbeing that will arise in the next generation, practices of commoning in ‘the real economy’ are essential. But the huge natural breadth of commoning calls for a lot of visioning and creeping-up-on, and the discourse(s) of commoning are as important as the practices of commoning. At the core the principle, of enabling at least as much scope for the good living of the grandchildren as has been available to the present generation, is why discovering how to live and breathe the commons, in all sectors of existence, matters so much. It provides, also, one of the strongest bridges between the environmentally engaged post-socialism of the North and indigeneities in the South. ### Intentions – Making a living economy > making a living economy ‘Economy’ embraces the provisioning of every kind of material means of subsistence and wellbeing; specifically, at this time in human history, it embraces not only _‘domesticated nature’_ (production and distribution networks, agriculture, domestic labour, social caring and medicine, forms of exchange and social organisation and governance, infrastructures, daily habits and relationships) but also _‘wild nature’_ (no longer a manifold of means to be relentlessly exploited and extracted, but a world of enormous power and complexity, under its own ‘laws’, that bites back when abused) and the enormously weird and barely emergent _‘golemic’_ sphere of digital means. ‘Economy’ in our times has become enormously complex, problematic and intrinsically hard to comprehend: way beyond modern aspiration to control, demanding new kinds of humility oriented to new kinds of stuff and relationship. What we need to vision and hold in our hearts is economy that is understood to be living (intrinsically animated, self-generating, evolving) , and which meets the needs of we humans for living well and in good, well-founded relationships in the world. The practice of this will become highly problematic in the next generations. But the vision of this, and the cultivation and elaboration and inhabiting of the vision of this, is vital for any continued prospect of living well. Conceptualising the practice of making a living economy, across this wide range of relationships, under many local circumstances, is something that we mean to approach through the evolution of a [pattern language frame](https://wiki.foprop.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/making-the-living-economy---the-foprop-weave/view/narrative-frame---making-a-living-economy/view/we-are-engaged "pattern language frame") . This manifestly will call for radically altered relations of production, root and branch, in all sectors of work and life, in culture and in the aesthetic landscape, as well as in the material plane and in economic relations. In the Seven Rs this means #regimechange (radically altered relations of production) and #reweaving (the practice of ’think global, make local’). A project of this kind necessarily aims at **renewed ontology**: what are the relations that constitute elements of ‘economy’ that are living, and how is it open to activist formations to remake those relations, in actual living, day-upon-day? Re-ontologising in this way, in this depth, is a project of collective imagination and persistence that needs must generate a re-founded language: _#language(ing) of struggle_. How we may do this mindfully, #beyondFragments, is a matter of our capacity in the dance of knowing and capability: and in addition to work ‘out there’ in society, work ‘on the page’ - we might equally say, ‘in the society of the page’? - is fundamental: reviewing, revisioning, evolving renewed narratives, generating and propagating ways of seeing and being in altered relationship. Through times of turmoil, when habitual and comprehensible, institutionalised practices on the ground will falter, on all scales, a rich capacity in language(ing) of struggle might just be one of the most productive, most sustainable, most scaleable, most practically concrete, most richly scoped things to attempt? Pattern language is a somewhat modern commitment. It’s rooted in the principle that **design** (in some sense) is possible and beneficial: evolved and curated understanding, skilfully and reflectively formulated need, carefully configured and curated means, capable and well distributed enactment, considerate and widely-scoped review. This whole mode is modern, and deeply problematised in all its dimensions: understanding (how? what modes of rigour?), need (whose? when and where?), ‘means’ that are not simply exploitative and extractive, collective capability to see, know and do (distributed in what ways?), reviewing that is historically, culturally and socially generous in its scope. The challenge, in the face of the hegemonised tunnel vision of the colonial-modern, couldn’t be deeper! Even so, within a project of hospicing modernity, of the kind proposed by Vanessa Andreotti and GTDF, this is the kind of root-and-branch re-making of relationships (relations of (re)production) that we have to be willing to undertake; and in a sense it is the relations of visioning and socially organising - ‘the #danceOfKnowing and capability’ - that are most foundational. It does seem to me that a pattern language(ing) project, across cultures, regions and formations, might be one of the most powerful kinds of contribution that might be made (alongside other powerful contributions with strong practical foundations, like the ‘ethnotherapeutic’ modes illustrated in _Hospicing modernity_) to the visioning and affective, prefigurative inhabiting of ‘living’, generative futures. ### Intentions - Cultivating collective, mutualised capability > cultivate the collective, mutualised capability to make (a living economy) The fundamental challenge of making a living economy is not ‘economic’ but ‘cultural’:is the making, nurturing and evolving of the **formations** of activists that are capable of the organising, making and sustaining - and especially, _formations-of-formations_ #beyondFragments. Visions and stories. Communications and platforms and means of coordination. Conceptualisations and systemic cognitions. Venues of self-aware learning and of mutual insight. Emotional and aesthetic resources. Capability in the dance of knowing, spanning poetry and documentation, history and infrastructure, ‘the green fuse’ and the long march. Literacy in the evolving of radically revised and renewed structures of feeling This is the work of _formación_ \`xxxlink\` Our particular approach to this challenge (there are many others; it’s a mix, a mutualisation, a matter of practical and aesthetic affiliations; a dance) is in terms of #pattern language (which is itself in its roots about #pluriverse) and then perhaps the creation of something that might be understood as a **‘college’**. Which is to say, a cultural commons, cross-regional and cross-generational and multi-language, that skilfully and persistently evolves, curates, stewards and mobilises pattern language: we may call this a _college of conviviality_. A college is a practice of course, and primarily not a practice of writing. Even so, writing (and writings: media) are fundamental in formación; the dance of knowing is significantly performed in language (and some of that in written or otherwise recorded language) even if it is more significantly performed in performance - _in the body_, singular and collective - and in the handling and organising of (non-linguistic, rudely material) _stuff_. Cultivating and propagating skill (in relation to materiality), institutionalising and regenerating genre (in relations of social practice). \`See Dance of knowing @ Skill xxx\` A college is thus primarily **a choreography**. And a blog like _Methuselah papers_, and a pattern language like #foprop, are fields and modes and locations and formations within such a dance: small institutions in the language(ing) of struggle. As a collection of evocative, actionable descriptions of ‘chunks of practice’, _pattern language(ing)_ is intrinsically a practice that goes ‘on to the page’. But then moves off it again, agile and deft, being sung and danced into the flow and the fabric of actual practices of making. Pattern language(ing) - the basic commitment of a college of conviviality - calls for ‘literary’ skills of a high order (in transactional and poetic and narrative writing), coupled with great facilitation (of conversations, of remembering, of affiliations, of collaborations, of _conscientización_, of mutual regard and recognition) and with ‘organising’ work; and of course - because every practice is ‘an economy’ - a well developed and sustainable _contribution economy_ involving both subsistence work and gift work, and possibly, a federated community of cultural coops. All of these matters of intention and organisation, skill and genre in a college of conviviality - reflections on all of these - are grist for the mill of this _Methuselah_ blog. Robin Murray gave a lot of attention in his later years to the challenge of **scope**, over and against the much-travelled challenges of scale and scaleability in radical practice, which he understood as a Fordist (thus archaic) problematic. He pursued this through a palette of organic metaphors: seeds, strawberry plants, intentional ecology \`xxxref\`. But I think he was barking up the wrong kind of tree in looking for linguistic metaphors. I think he already had the model for scope-making in his practice, as what he referred to (in a memorable presentation on the state of the game in Fairtrade \`refxxx\`) merely as ‘networking’, but which manifestly was a persistent and creative and enthusiastic and generous and attentive weaving of people with insight, across sectors and across regions and across disciplines and traditions, to mutually learn from and inform one another’s practical radicalisms in a politics of (economic and cultural) production and re-production. He already knew about _formación_. The term itself is his, he routinely used it (Spanish, because English has no useful equivalent) through the 80s, in the setting of the Greater London Council and its attempt at regional economy ‘for labour’. Formación as a practice - thus, the practice of a college of conviviality - is the means of scope. It’s not basically linguistic and metaphorical, it’s basically a matter of genre: performance, a dance of knowing and making, in radical relationship. At the same time., we can note that formación (as distinct from _economy)_ is not what Robin, the organiser and fairtrader and social entrepreneur, wrote about. In the _Methuselah_ papers, writing about formación (as distinct from economy) is at the heart of things: facilitating a movement from _economics_ to _organising_. Cultivating the commons ethos - and importantly, practical _protocols_ of commoning - are basic. As a cultural commons of a foundational kind, the college is naturally a lab for evolving and propagating such. And _Methuselah_ is a venue for reflection on these practices. ### Intentions - Commitments of we activists in the mutual sector, beyond fragments > activists continuing to cultivate capability, beyond fragments, For my generation of feminist socialists, movement ‘beyond the fragments’ quickly became an explicit need. Already in 1979 Sheila Rowbotham, Lyn Segal and Hilary Wainwright published [a book](https://sources.wiki.foprop.org/rowbotham-segal-wainwright.html "a book"), acknowledging the fragmentation of progressive movements in Britain and proposing that forms of organising originating in feminism needed adopting very widely on the Left. Over the succeeding 40 years that need has only become wider and more pressing, embracing many kinds of fragmentation (colonial, ethnic, regional, sectional, topical, cultural, etc). It’s the same impulse of recognition as that which, thirty years or so later, in a context decoloniality generated ‘pluriverse’ . > Rowbotham, Segal & Wainwright (2013), _Beyond the fragments - Feminism and the making of socialism_, revised edition, [Left Book Club](https://leftbookclub.com/books/beyond-the-fragments/ "Left Book Club"). Myself, in the 2020s, I found myself needing adequately to to recognise the irreducible plurality of movements and formations that were present in the notional ‘community’ of a global digital infrastructure coop: [meet.coop](https://www.meet.coop "meet.coop"), the Online Meeting Coop. Relatively new to the organising context of global civil society, and innocent of all the debates that have gone on about the nature and the emergence of this field, I hacked a response to this challenge in the form of a collection of ‘seven R’s of activist commitment: * _Rescue_ - Intervening to ensure safety and respite, to people and planet in clear and present danger. * _Resistance_ - Fighting for our (collective) lives and defending our territories in the face of entrenched commitments that can destroy us. Digging where we stand 'here'. * _Reporting & recording_ - Reporting voices from elsewhere; engaging and animating lives beyond the reach of peer-to-peer relationship and immediate knowable community: past, present and future. * _Re-weaving_ - Community life and work, re-made root and branch, hands-on, in mutuality, with vision; which is to say, in the commons. Literally reconstructed forces of material, cultural and aesthetic production. * _Reparation & reconciliation_ - for the harms of coloniality and modernity: social justice, fair dues, restorative justice, climate justice, design justice. * _Regenerative activism_ - The grandchildren. The moment/the next moment; the breath. A species among species, nurture. Deep time, evolving structures of feeling, equanimity, the eight worldly winds; eldership, indigeneity, demodernity. The heart, the heart-mind. The forces of life and death, renewal and exhaustion. * _Regime change_ aka revolution - New order, historical, epochal. Radically altered relations of production in all spheres. The practice of dual power. Continuing revolution. This formed the basis for an approach (within meet.coop) to **design justice**, in evolving a stack of digitally mediated commons: [fedwiki page](https://wiki.foprop.org/design-justice.html "fedwiki page"). To engage seriously in movements across fragments and in pluriversality is also to insist - as feminism has done - on ‘a voice from somewhere’, from ‘here’., rather than the voice from nowhere assumed by scientific and technical rationality It is to pursue active collaboration and mutual regard, across regions, across generations, across languages, across formations; and across the divides of modernity and coloniality, patriarchy and class. Within the seven Rs, this commitment is most manifestly present in #3 Reporting & recording (voices from elsewhere) and #5 Reparation & reconciliation (for the harms of coloniality and modernity). And #3 also references the important global civil society phenomenon of movements-of-movements, and networks-of-networks like, for example, the post-development formation, [Global Tapestry of Alternatives](www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org "Global Tapestry of Alternatives") > Across the world, there is resistance to the dominant, ecologically destructive and socially inequitable model of ‘development’ that has been imposed by capitalist, statist, and patriarchal forces. Simultaneously there is a search for radical, systemic alternatives to this model. Such alternatives may be re-assertions of ancient ways of being that remain very relevant, in old or new forms, such as the worldviews and lifestyles of many indigenous peoples or the recommoning of spaces. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, they may be more recent emergences and articulations such as eco- feminism, degrowth, and the digital commons. They range from initiatives in specific sectors such as sustainable and holistic agriculture, community-led water/energy/food sovereignty, solidarity and sharing economy, worker take-over of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, local governance, community health and alternative learning, inter-community peace-building, and gender equality, to more holistic or rounded transformations such as those being attempted by the Zapatista in the Chiapas of Mexico, and the Kurds in Rojava and other parts of their territory in the trijunction of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. > > Ashish Kothari 2020, ‘Earth Vikalp Sangam - Proposal for a Global Tapestry of Alternatives’, _Globalizations_, 2020, vol. 17, NO. 2, 245–249. [doi](https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2019.1670955 "doi") Writing (and thus _Methuselah papers_) can write _about_ this - the cultivation of capability beyond fragments - and can _instantiate_ this in the scope of its topics and subjects. And maybe, writing can be _an occasion_ for this: engagements around pieces of writing (webinars, online discussion series, wikis, etc) among members of multiple formations, with an orientation to pluriverse and a desire for mutuality of orientation and regard. In any case, the value of any piece of writing is in not in what is ‘in’ it, but only in what it can be adopted as an _occasion_ for. Writing somehow seems fundamental in movement beyond fragments. A note on **activists** and their language(ing) . . . Activism involves transformation in the relations of production: of life, of self and collectivity; of real economy, of individual and collective capability, of peace and generational legacy. If the relations of production in practice, of practice, are not transformed, ‘change’ is just churn. We don’t have to subscribe to modernist progress to hold this; what we do have to subscribe to is wise intention, elderhship, the communication of insight into how things may be done well: to goodwill, compassion, suchness and equanimity in the face of papanca and the eight worldly winds. In a practice of pattern language(ing), what makes it an _activist_ language is, first, the patterning of skilful, intentional _doing_ (practice, praxis), and second, the presence, at the heart of any pattern, any molecule of practice-description, of a transformation in relations of production: (re)production of . . . structures of feeling (foprop [#zone ¿1](https://wiki.foprop.org/zone-1---in-here-care-work.html "#zone ¿1")), arrangements of provisioning in the real economy ([#zone ¿2](https://wiki.foprop.org/zone-2---here-subsistence-work.html "#zone ¿2")), formación ([#zone ¿3](https://wiki.foprop.org/zone-3---we-formacin-work.html "#zone ¿3")), or cross-regional and cross-generational relationship ([#zone ¿4](https://wiki.foprop.org/zone-4---region-stewarding-work.html "#zone ¿4")). Writing in a patterned way (inside a generous pattern-template) makes a definite place for this kernel of radicalism: the ‘core intention’ section of the foprop [pattern language template](https://families.wiki.foprop.org/pattern-template.html "pattern language template"). ### Intentions - Explicit understanding xxx dance of knowing, cultural landscape . pattern language. #papanca, ‘theory’, rigorous conceptualisation, The power of ‘framing’ and its relations with other powers, sevenRs #reporting #NewsFromElsewhere #travelogue `What can be done through the making of a language? As a mindful action.` ### Intentions - A parallel articulation of threads in a weave xxx not just seven Rs but also landscapes and zones of reach. a weave . scope and openness , pattern language(ing) pattern families #foprop `What can be done through the making of a language? As a mindful action.` ### Intentions - Offering practical-conceptual beginnings and framings xxx college? online, publishing. Dialogue? practical-conceptual. A limited lifespan, durability and extent of documents. #travelogue. theory of and in practice, here, mapping `What can be done through the making of a language? As a mindful action.` ## Patterning this paper? It’s an intention in _Methuselah papers_ to generate patterns within the foprop pattern language. This blog has sketched a very large map, much larger than we can attempt to frame patterwise at this moment. But for starters, let’s adopt each element in the intentions of this project, as expanded under headings above, and propose a corresponding pattern. Thus, the following seven patterns can be seeded at least as placeholders [in foprop](https://wiki.foprop.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/making-the-living-economy---the-foprop-weave "in foprop"). > This will take a while to enact, so the next blog will take a while to deliver. Meanwhile, do check out the pages [in fedwiki](https://flow.wiki.foprop.org/narrative-flow---the-foprop-weave.html "in fedwiki") and the most recent state of pattern updates in [flow news](https://flow.wiki.foprop.org/flow-news.html "flow news") * Intention - Offering practical-conceptual beginnings and framings. Pattern: _Gathering around documents_ - Offer documents as occasions for self-aware mutualising within pluriverse.\[ Zone ¿3 _Formación work_\] * Intention - A parallel articulation of threads in a weave. Pattern: _A vernacular practice of theory_ - xxx reflect, seek rigour. .\[ Zone ¿3 _Formación work_\] * Intention - A weave of explicit understanding. Pattern: _Dancing the dance of knowing_ - xxx Ontologising as an activist practice, in the vernacular s. Pattern: _Radical reconstruction, radical humanism, radical expansion across species and generations_. Pattern: _Continuity through the crisis and the collapse_? .\[Zone¿3 _Formación work_\] * Intention - Commitments of we activists in the mutual sector, beyond fragments. Pattern: _Organising beyond fragments_ - xxx .\[ Zone ¿1 _Care work_\] * Intention - Cultivating collective, mutualised capability. Pattern _Convening a college of conviviality_ - xxx formación. .\[Zone ¿4 _Stewarding work_\] * Intention - Making a living economy. Pattern _The real economy is foundational_ - xxx _Living_ economy. .\[Zone ¿2 _Subsistence work_\] * Intention - In the commons. Pattern: _Commoning everything_ - all means of subsistence and wellbeing, material means, cultural means, aesthetic means. Pattern: _Stewarding commons-of-commons_.\[ Zone ¿4 _Stewarding work_\] ###