A frame is needed for regime change . . something which majors on changing fundamental, underlying RoPs themselves, in actual  practices, through emergent cultural and economic formations, in actual life . . until the emergent economy/society/trade network - comprising many interwoven #emergent practices - has the weight and centrality and thrust to push the ex-#dominant regime to the margins for whole communities of people, in #residual (detoxified) forms.

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A regime with this weight, centrality and thrust is a new, non-capitalist, mode of production. Why pull punches, calling it ‘innovation’; even ’social’ innovation? This is revolution: long revolution . . and  ‘commoning’ is the transformative, would-be hegemonic politics that moves definitively beyond Capital and liberal-democratic State . . .

 

Which is to say . . beyond the RoPs that characterise and constitute these currently-dominant constellations of forms (§1), formations (§2) and forces (§3).

 

The pattern language, then, is focused on the event-by-event making (‘epiphanies’) of an activist life: in making emergent counter-hegemonic practices of working, living and organising . . emergent forms and formations and forces . . event by event.

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This frame is designed for mapping dominant, residual and emergent FoPs, of several distinct kinds (§1/2/3 three landscapes, pictured as weft in the weave) calling for quite distinct kinds of perception and action.  It’s also for designing new FoPs.

 

Power/s (and transformation of power/s) is baked right into foprop, in the notion of RoPs. The ‘change’ - or 'Next System' or ‘transformation’ - aimed for by activists is thought in terms of alternative RoPs (again, of markedly differing kinds in the three spheres). In radical practices of commoning, altered RoPs - ARoPs - are bedded into new, emergent FoPs woven by activist maker-venturers. The weave is a weave of actual practices, a fabric of community life and work, culture and feeling, provisioning and affiliation, money and tech.

Be a little wary, how you respond to 'design'. It sounds kind-of tech? I'm a designer by temperament and occupation, so of course I think design is a wonderful word to use. But you can think in terms of . .

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• Skilful weaving (the weaver's dance at the loom, over a previously figured-out, complex weave) or cultivating (the gardener's year-on-year visioning and watching, pruning and planting).

• Choreography or musical improvisation (where rehearsing and gigging within a dance- or music-culture = 'design')

• Surfing and aikido (where the training of the reflexive, kinaesthetic body-mind, within a tradition = 'design').

 

As in all design, design action is a dialectic (a dance) between standing back, with the Big Picture in Deep Time, and getting right up close with the material detail, in many locations, in the moment. And in foprop . . in historical, remembered, Culture Time, in the biographical Life Time of the activist.

FoP RoP may look pretty conceptual, with all these schemas, its warps and wefts and multiple patterns. But actually it’s more like Buddhism, which can look pretty conceptual at first, with its many ‘Buddhist lists’ . . but it’s all in the quiet, attentive dance, in the sensing-and-knowing body. In the unfolding landscape. Under the worldly winds.

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