Three landscapes - material. cultural, aesthetic - are offered as three broad, interweaving framings of the relationship of an activist (or any person) with the material world, which is to say, a framing of conditions for living an actual human life.
§ landscapes - Three landscapes of practice
The three landscapes - material, cultural, aesthetic - necessarily interweave, but they call for quite distinct kinds of recognition and handling. That is . . >distinct skills, genres, stories and frames of conceptualisation.
Each landscape is understood as cycling necessarily in its turn to the top of the stack of awareness. All are mobilised skilfully and necessarily in activist practice. The appropriate skills differ across the three landscapes, and all call for skilful cultivation in activist formacion. >Formacion: see the link at the foot of the page.
All three landscapes are fully material, and thus are always already-present: it is **the same body** - the actor’s - that is necessarily present in all of them.
Thus on one hand, no action in a landscape is without consequences in the others; and on the other hand, any action in any landscape may - with appropriate intention and skill - mobilise resources in another, which arise from quite different kinds of conditions and call upon quite different kinds of skills.
Actions need not, of course , be conducted by persons alone. Typically actions are collective, and distributed, within some **formation/s** of practice (§2), across persons.
Here we offer a systems-map of each landscape.
The systems maps on pages below are work-in-progress versions. Each map has three elements . . - **Dramatis personae** - The enduring 'things' and forms that constitute structure in the landscape, and function as actors, or resources, or places where action occurs. - **Process map** - The dominant, central processes that constitute the dynamics in the landscape: how transformation occurs, which transformations occur, how readily they occur. - **Characteristic behaviours** - In a map-for-activism, the characteristic behaviours are those that are anticipated in the transformed system of practice - that is, the transformed fabric of forces of production (FoP). In foprop, these are specified in terms of RoP (relations of production) - both dominant RoP in the present, and intended RoP that characterise the prefigurative and transformed fabric of forces of production.
Systems-maps for three landscapes . .
Here we describe the material landscape of provision and access, and their radical transforming and mobilising.
Here we describe the cultural landscape - Labour powers and formations of labour powers, and their radical transforming and mobilising.
Here we describe the aesthetic landscape - the landscape of affiliations and orientations, perceptions and intentions, and their radical transforming and mobilising.
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Production was a central orientation in Robin Murray’s practice, and 'formacion' was a significant variant of this - especially in the latter part of his life, with **Synergia**, **Schumacher College** & **the Coop University**. But it's not something he addressed much on the page. This chapter makes an attempt at that.