Making a Living Economy is a revolutionary practice of living and making. The patterns of the foprop pattern language are a way of holding the theory of this practice; and the foprop weave is a way of holding the patterns. The materiality of this may be engaged through three 'landscapes' in which living is simultaneously and continuously enacted. Here we sketch the three landscapes.
This is a branch from the foprop weave
foprop is a perspective of actively visioning, experiencing and making, of an activist (or activist formations), living and working in the mundane practical world. All action is in all three landscapes - because **the body** is the same body in all of them. We have just the one! In just the one life! In just one place at any time. See: Materialism. The body
At any moment, one or another landscape will be on top of the stack of awareness, constantly shifting in a dance of attention. This foprop pattern language is about choreographing that dance with skill and awareness, in skilfully and continuously re-making a living economy.
This schema below summarises the paragraphs that follow. The tags - material, cultural, aesthetic - are problematic. All of these terms have complex usages, sometimes contradictory, sometimes rolled-up together. But we need a language for thinking-with and, like Humpty Dumpty, we'll pay these words extra, and put them to work. In foprop these are theoretical terms, not just casual pieces of ordinary language.
**§1 The material landscape** Provisioning and access of material means of subsistence and wellbeing
Here - §1 Material landscape
This is basically ‘the economy’ as we mundanely experience it - material economy, use-value economy, 'real economy'. Our mundane, living & working, caring & labouring activity places and produces material bodies - humans, plants, animals, inanimate stuff - where they may be of use and benefit to some person (materially, culturally, affectively). We contionuously and mundanely **make provision** for need that we anticipatre will arise, through dispositions of material stuff. This is the real economy.
> This is a landscape of the de facto placement & action of stuff - of **fiat**. In *Al Capone*, Prince Buster pointed out that "Guns. Don't. Hargue." Likewise, stuff don't hargue neither.
Animate and inanimate stuff - weather, ecosystems, microbiomes, mycelium, thermodynamic systems - places itself wherever it does, without regard for the needs of persons . . and is fundamentally, enormously, infrastructurally, powerful.
Much of the most important stuff is **wild**, some of it is **feral** - misinformed culture gone wrong. Some is **prosthetic** and some is **domestic** - taken for granted as fabric of everyday living in communities. The sphere of the more recent, algorithmic-digital stuff, is extremely problematic and, as yet, shallowly and unskillfully understood: it is **'golemic'**, an unaccustomed, partly autonomous and (despite being tagged 'articial intelligence') mindless amalgam of deceptively clear writing (programming) and enormously extended, distributed, dumb machine-muscle. > See code/golemic xxx
We weave this animate fabric (these highly plural, interlacing fabrics) of people and stuff as well as we can - the landscape of material **forms**. Its threads are everyday mundane practices of living and working, somewhere in the mesh of society. Society is cultural (§2) and aesthetic (§3); but it sure as hell is material-economic (§1). Dig where you stand. There is work to be done here, provision to be made. > Technology is society made durable. (Bruno Latour) The zone of reach ¿2 Here is founded in the material landscape. Zone ¿2 - Here - To be added xxx See: Weft §1 - Material landscape
**§2 The cultural landscape** The conscious dance of knowing, visioning, organising
We - §2 Cultural landscape
This landscape can be seen as ‘culture’ if we’re very careful about what we mean with that slippery and important word. Here it means all of the **labour-powers** that people have, in a community, collective or practice - the totality of aware **mental and bodily capabilities** to . .
> . . vision, collaborate, act-on, act-in, speak about, re-vision, design, make, anticipate, cultivate, sculpt, sow, nurture, re-shape, harvest, prioritise, organise, agree; collectively remember, participate in genres, rigorously think about, pass on stories, create and work with symbols, work with documents and media . . etc etc.
Some of these are tacit (held in the body) and some explicit (worked in language, and today, powerfully in code). There is a ‘dance of knowing’ here that is complex and calls for a lot of literacy and balance. It includes all institutions, genres and organisational **formations**. The dance can be wonderfully graceful or muscular, and unbelievable hamfisted. It's the dance that was being articulated in the self-making of the English working class 250 years back, as lovingly annotated by EP Thompson.
**§3 The aesthetic landscape** Handling affect & impulse to produce attention & affiliation, orientation & intention > Mobilising in-here material awareness and insight, in responding skilfully to a plurality of in-heres, going-on out-there.
In-here - §3 Aesthetic-affective landscape
This is the in-here landscape of affect and sensation and emotion, thoughts and images, impulses and intentions and affiliations. It comprises impulsive, pre-conscious or proto-conscious **movements-towards and movements-away**, mostly unwitting and often lurching, sometimes well-choreographed, well founded and elegant, imbued with great 'suchness'. The in-here landscape can be understood as the heart-mind. It helps to see it this way, since this gives access to 100 generations of tradition in skilful in-the-body engagement in and with this landscape. Heart mind - To be added xxx
Sometimes it’s called the **structure of feeling** in a community or tradition. In times of trouble and confusion or exhilaration, it can be **‘the moral economy of the crowd’** - a basically untrustworthy but often (in Romanticism, and many activist traditions) worshipped force. It’s fluid, a constant tide. The first nine-tenths of it - the first 500ms - are in the preconscious. Only then does the conscious mind get a look-in. There's the rub. That tiny window is where the rubber hits the road! What skill it takes, to live in that tiny, flowing space! Structures of feeling - To be added xxx
Basic activist literacy in making the living economy includes the equivalent of surfing, aikido, solo ocean-yachting or gymnastics, in the field of these inescapable and forceful **forces** - 'the eight worldly winds' - and the skilful navigating of the oceans of emotion that tribes (communities, families, nations, 'we') are composed of. Skilled management-from-within of the **wild commons of emotion** (contribution from within, in landscape §3) is an urgent challenge, inseparable from the challenges of managing-from-within the **wild commons of nature** (contribution from within, in landscape §1). As distinct from emotional **commons**, what social groups normally get by on are minimal **unregulated common pools**. Worldly winds - To be added xxx
'The personal' is **enormously** political.
--- Each of these landscapes is constituted in a kind of relationship between in-here and out-there. This is not simply a distinction; it automatically proposed a **relation**. The landscapes - including §3 the most intimately 'personal' - are irreducibly social. See: In-here and out-there. Structure & agency
--- Next : A mapping space for patterns of practice