The Methuselah papers – Elder regions & deep time, living economy & tools for conviviality

An intention of radical re-ontologising

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

Halifax: This is where I was brought up. But I didn’t know it in these ways above – C19 hub of Chartism and associationist socialism – 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 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:

I’ll work in reverse order, from the largest and most recalcitrant of the intentions (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 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 in the field of digital infrastructure and Solidarity Economy Principles and Practices 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 also because their needs for radically re-founded alternatives, in ‘the margins that occupy in the centre’, are profound and immediate matters of day-by-day concern. I noted this for example in 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 (pdf download) and Pluriverse– A post-development dictionary (also at University of Columbia 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, 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.

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 (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, influencing our 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, contra-capitalist commitment that my baby-boomer Northern generation have cultivated, which are, precisely, ‘modern’ (and tacitly colonialist) in both their context and also in many of their intentions. See also ‘high’ and ‘low’ intensity struggle, above; a more helpful way (?) of framing ‘privilege’?

Paulo Freire references & downloads

Illich references and 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 too of writing, in its relations with other dimensions of collective practice, consciousness and aesthetic formations, and of ‘theory’ (or rather the practice of theory) as an organic intellectual commitment to going beyond and behind and beneath ‘the obvious’ and the quotidian; thus also, by extension, both psychotherapy and the general limits of ‘talk’’ as a carrier and trigger of insight. I’m thinking especially 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).

Gary Werskey 1997, The Marxist critique of capitalist science – A history in three movements? Science as Culture, Vol. 16, No. 4, 397 – 461. A review of the new-left positions of the Radical Science Journal collective

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. 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, in mutuality with itself) , 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. 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 tthat we might 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? in what time and place?), ‘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

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. 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 intentionally 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. 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) 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, generally 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 – is 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 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 the need to deal with fragmentation has only become wider and more pressing, embracing many dimensions (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 of decoloniality generated ‘pluriverse’ .

Rowbotham, Segal & Wainwright (2013), Beyond the fragments – Feminism and the making of socialism, revised edition, Left Book Club. See also this wiki page.

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, 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:

- 1 Rescue – Intervening to ensure safety and respite, to people and planet in clear and present danger.

- 2 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'.

- 3 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.

- 4 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.

- 5 Reparation & reconciliation – for the harms of coloniality and modernity: social justice, fair dues, restorative justice, climate justice, design justice.

- 6 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.

- 7 Regime change aka revolution, root-&-branch transformation – 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.

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 that’s 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.

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, #2, 245–249. 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 practices of radical 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 then ‘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, eldership, and the communication across generations and across regions 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 altered relations of (re)production: of . . . structures of feeling (foprop zone ¿1), arrangements of provisioning in the real economy (zone ¿2), formación (zone ¿3), or cross-regional and cross-generational relationship and stewardship (zone ¿4). Writing in a patterned way (inside a generous pattern template) provides a specific location for this kernel of radicalism in each pattern: the ‘core intention’ section.

Intentions – A weave of explicit understanding

weave of explicit understanding

Explicit understandings are at the core of our concerns in Methuselah papers. This means understanding about practices, their relationships and affiliations, their dynamics and formations and their possible, intended and anticipated consequences. It means understandings expressed in language – natural language, not formal language or code – but formulated systematically and with rigour, for purposes of careful curating and careful comparison, caring evolution and creative reworking. It means understandings that ordinarily are in (spoken) language of one kind an another and also understandings that tacit – in the sense of being enacted or performed as distinct from spoken-about. We’re concerned with language-of-doing as well as language-of-saying.

I have a schema (below) that covers this scope in what I find to be a highly useful and also expansively flexible way. I’ve been using it for almost 30 years. It was originated by Noam Cook and John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC in the mid-90s (I first began using it in draft, as a PARC working paper), in the midst of widespread post-Fordist corporate concern over ‘knowledge management’. Adopting the ‘turn to practice’ that was quite widely present in work at PARC at that time, and specifically the more ethniomethodological variants, Cook and Brown addressed ‘knowledge’ not as some kind of ‘stuff’ that can be stored and handled (often confused with texts, datasets and other documentary artefacts) but as a matter of people, in practices in practical settings, actively and continuously knowing the world into shapes of one kind an another, with some degree of skill and capability, both as individuals and as collectives, working in both explicit language and tacitly ‘in practice’ (in the body, and in relation to the ‘bodies’ of artefacts of many kinds as well as of other persons).

Dance of knowing, tacitness, skill

This led Cook & Brown to offer a 2x2 grid schema as below, with ‘individual’ and ‘group’ modes of knowing on one axis, and ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ modes on the other. The four cells were tagged concepts, stories, skills and genres, and the essential thing about the schema was the ‘generative dance of knowing’ that may be collectively performed, winding a skein of practice across all four quadrants, weaving a fabric of lived capability in a community of practice.

Cook & Brown 1999, ‘Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance Between Organizational Knowledge and Organizational Knowing’. pdf

We might link this distinction with the classic dualism of left- and right-brain perception (although this far from the whole story) and although practice in the ‘concepts’ quadrant can be highly mechanistic and schematic (notably ‘science’ in general, and algorithmic encoding per se) there certainly are some kinds of rigorous practice on the left that are relatively holistic (‘right-brain’) even though they engage with ‘objects and systems’. I’m thinking for example of ‘philosophy’(which in some sense intends to systematise thought under a discipline of rigorous knowing of some kind, and is certainly not ‘just storytelling’, which would place it on the right-hand side) . I’m thinking also of ’the systems approach’ as articulated by C West Churchman, which is a pragmatic discipline rather than ‘a body of thought’, and exists as much in the ‘genre’ quadrant as it does in ‘concepts’. It’s not accidental that both Cook and West Churchman both were members of philosophy faculties in US universities.

Churchman 1968, The systems approach, Churchman 1971 The Design of Inquiring Systems,. See Ulrich 2002, West Churchman, home page.

There will be a lot m more to say in Methuselah papers about how this map can be used. But here’s below is a refinement that I’ve found necessary. Rather than seeing the left column as ‘individual’ and the right as ‘group’, I understand practices-of-knowing on the left to be conducted in relation to Objects and systems as distinct from the relationship on the right, with Subjects or persons and collectives of persons.

Most significantly in our present context, I see pattern language(ing) – the approach that I basically try to sponsor here in Methuselah – as living in that top-left quadrant. Patterns are ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’; in a sense they might almost be said to be ’scientific (although ‘art’ in an almost defunct sense – ‘the practical arts’ – says this better. A little more below, on not doing ‘science’). But at the same time, the pieces of language within a pattern (strictly, a pattern description: an assemblage of several kinds of textual and visual elements) may include – actually must include – ‘poetic’ elements, elements of storytelling, and descriptions or evocations of genre, so that they might be mobilised as ‘scripts’ or prompts for actions-in-contexts, and might be ‘sung’ and ‘danced’ – broadly, woven – into the stream of ongoing practice in improvisatory, contextual ways.

I also tweaked the tagging of the vertical dimension – ‘tacit – in the body’ and ‘explicit – in language’. This is not fundamentally a change but it does emphasise the body in its complex and puzzling relationship, within human existence, with language: both bodies of material objects and systems that act and interact in body-like, material ways as stuff (plants, furniture, materials for craftwork, documents, tools, regions of built environment, ecosystems, geological formations, etc etc) and the human body as a distinctive and peculiar kind of material-systemic entity, both in space and time, and within materially- and culturally- and aesthetically-articulated collectives of bodies aka persons.

Within the tagging of the quadrants, ‘skill’ is somehow basic. We routinely use the term ‘skill’ when we want to refer to rigour of some kind, and sensitive conduct of practical relationship, in whatever quadrant. Somehow the practical relationship of individuals with their worlds, in the moment of (re)production, of intention, of enactment, is where we believe the rubber hits the road. ‘Skill’ is a central orientation and valuation in Buddhist dhamma: ‘skilful’ formation of intentions, in equanimity under the eight worldly winds, at the pivotal place where legacy passes over into consequences: kamma. Genre is then almost equally basic: the collective counterpart of individual skill. We see basic reliance on genre (genre-practice, genre-enculturation, genre-revaluation) for example in the ethnotheraputic project of Hospicing modernity and other approaches to radical transformation as community development.

Theory, the power of framing

In the foprop pattern language and in activist practice generally, knowledge(ing) – in its conventional sense of conceptualising, categorising and more-or-less formal linguistic codifying (the top-left quadrant) – is secondary to capable doing (the bottom row of the dance-of-knowing grid). But it matters: in part, because objectified (documentary) forms – like pattern language – can be durable and communicable across times and distances, and in part because conceptual rigour, extended over a large field (again, as in a pattern language or a ’systems approach’) is a powerful mode of ‘top-left’ knowing that must be given place in the generative dance alongside (top-right) forms of ‘storytelling’ rigour(s) ), bottom-left discipline with ‘stuff’, and bottom-right dramaturgical-directorial ‘organiser’-rigour(s) and customary/everyday/traditional/indigenous rigour(s).

‘Theory’ matters too in practices of change: de- and re-ontologising, systematic language(ing, disciplined conceptualising and categorising. It needs to go beyond philosophy in its practicality (for example, in a marriage with pragmatics, like Churchman’s ’systems approach’) and also in the systematic refinement and presentation of a lexicon. But stopping way short of ‘science’ as a collapse into formalistic, abstracted codification and ‘data worship’, remaining close to speakable language and experienced phenomena, and thus able to mobilise poesy, biography, stream of consciousness and ‘the voice from ‘here’ in community and in deep time. My sense is that pattern language is up to this challenge, as a richly hybridised form of top-left language(ing( practice. A pattern language can admirably serve for ‘theory of practice’.

One thing that’s at stake in weighing up matters of theory and systematic conceptualising is the power of framing and its relations with other powers. A theory-of-practice frame (eg a pattern language) serves to frame a practice, allowing for careful choices, sensitive anticipations, appropriate expectations, practical hints, conceptual references and landmarks (indexicality), memorable (inhabitable) forms of expression and speakable language. In relation to the powers of various kinds of activist commitment, as recognised in the #sevenRs (which themselves are bottom-right genres), theory-of-practice is especially relevant in framing rescue, resistance, re-making, reparation and regime change. The remaining two Rs – reporting (#NewsFromElsewhere #travelogue) and reparation are more matters of top-right modes of languageing: narrative, evocative, poetic, effective in conscientización and the framing of I/thou relationships.

Intentions – A parallel articulation of threads in a weave of conceptualisation and storytelling

parallel articulations of threads in a weave

Given our commitment to pluriverse – a weave of diverse and distinctly, respectfully differing local/regional/traditional commitments and insights – it obviously matters to organise pattern language itself as a weave, and to facilitate the representation and production of diverse threads within a weave. The way I set out to handle this in #foprop is through the foprop weave: a matrix of three kinds of ‘landscape’ and four extents of ‘reach’ and proximity, which is understood to be the richly diverse field for a ‘dance’ and a live choreography of practice, like the dance at the centre of the 2x2 dance-of-knowing schema. See landscapes, zones and the weave, below.

Three landscapes of everyday living and making. § is pronounced ‘landscape’.

Four zones of proximity & reach. ¿ is pronounced ‘zone’.

The foprop weave: §landscapes of practice (engagement with different practical stuff) and ¿zones of reach (intimacy, impact, indeterminacy)

Distributed across this field are numerous pattern families, which occupy some intersection of landscape (material/cultural/aesthetic) and zone of reach (in-here/here/we/region), and any particular practice will almost necessarily thread-together patterns from a number of families, across landscapes and zones. This weave of systematically-supported languageing thus offers the distinct possibility of supporting and drawing from a pluriversal weave of practice.

Practically, the weave provides a map for organising a ‘college’ of activist capability, in which pattern families might be schools (where patterns – the capacity for appropriate engagement with specific elements in the activist world – are curated and mobilised) and zones of reach might be faculties (where relations across zones – the comprehensive reach and distributiuon of attention in activist practice – are attended to). In the present stage of thinking there are around 40 pattern families, shown below in a ‘college’ presentation.

Intentions – Offering practical-conceptual beginnings and framings

To offer beginnings and framings . .

The conceptual beginnings and framings are outlined above: the foprop weave and its families of patterns. But what about practical offers? Having let go of the commitment to organising (as I acknowledged early in this essay) what might be offered around a practice of writing: Methuselah papers? My answer is basically: dialogues. This is a version of a pattern, Gathering around documents, below.

Two dialogues might be defined. The first is directly related to ongoing work published here. In an online meeting space – perhaps a reincarnation of meet.coop `commons.hour` – it’s possible to convene dialogues spinning off from and bearing on this series. I mean to do this when the series has settled a bit more, and the initial wave of somewhat abstract and schematic framing (this is only the third post in the series) has passed into writing of a more textured and experientially grounded kind.

A second dialogue might be framed by Hospicing modernity. That book is presented as a ‘curriculum’ for a practice of what I’m calling, for lack of a more familiar term, ethotherapy. Rather than attempting to mobilise this as an individual, it makes obvious sense to convene a community of dialogue, perhaps a study circle. This is an aim I would like to adopt but, right now, it’s unclear whether it’s practically supportable under present circumstances (there are a number of things going on that call for a lot of emotional space, time and bandwidth). So: watch this space? But in principle, a study circle around Hospicing modernity might be the best way of offering a shared practice of dialogue and exploration, that relates to the intentions of Methuselah papers. Which are, just to recap:

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.

Patterning this paper?

It’s an intention in this series 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 the 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 (actually, nine) can be seeded at least as placeholders 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 and the most recent state of pattern updates in flow news.

The Methuselah papers

Elder regions, deep time, living economy – https://write.as/papers/
This is mike hales blogging on pattern language(ing) and language(ing) of struggle as everyday activist practices in making a living economy.

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Contact and comment:
– Email: blog AT conviv.mayfirst.org
– Fediverse (Mastodon) : @mike_hales@social.coop

This blog is linked with some sister sites:
– The foprop frame – Pattern language of making a living economy
– A book of skill – The living and storying of an activist life
– Methuselah papers – Mirror site for the blog, in the fediverse

Book downloads are here including Living thinkwork (1980) and Location - Explorations of power(s) and landscapes of design (2016).