Here we consider capacity for being alive to ‘the heart’ - the forces, means and consequences of literacy (and lack of literacy) in the production (and altered production) of the heart-mind. This takes us into considerations of ‘the long now’, and other modes of time, in everyday working and living - notably in **the self-conscious making of an activist life** in the face of crisis for the species and many fellow species.
This is a branch from Living economy.
In a time of populisms, fake news, fundamentalisms and burgeoning crisis and confusion, it’s clear that there is a premium on the capacity to navigate in great alive oceans of emotion, and windsurf under wild and forceful worldly winds of sentiment, judgement, prejudice and expectation. This is a matter of being *alive to the difficulty*, of being *alive to the plural ways* in which these forces move in the everyday living of life in plural ways, and being *alive to the skilfulness* with which a person - pivotally, the activist, the one who intends radical change - may **construct a life**: their own, their one life on the face of the planet.
The activist needs these capacities in order to know how her own buttons get pushed, and to nevertheless make the wise choice. She needs to know how the buttons of others are pushed, in order to chose wisely how to engage in this, as push comes to shove. Altered practices - altered *relations*, profoundly *mutual* relations - of production of *intention and valuing* are at stake. A revolution of aesthetic capability.
These are things that perhaps, in the nature of living, become more available to a person as they become older. Today, however, we do not have time to wait.
The generation of baby-boomers and war babies could expect to work their shift, make their contribution in the emerging tradition, and anticipate success in another time, as capability evolved and events transpired, and ‘that old mole, the revolution’ burrowed, undermined and pushed up fresh tilth. Millennials, and our grandchildren, cannot hold this expectation: the time is now.
This is new, quite ‘post’ the modernist expectation of progress, and although there have been previous millenialist periods, this one is founded in utterly material circumstances: the calving icecaps have the story written on the face of them. Being fully alive to this, and maintaining our capacity of aliveness *in* this, is a challenge our species has not had to rise to before; and perhaps is able - with the legacies of modernism - to rise to. The project of achieving this is, in now-living lifetimes, is fundamental to the other two - the project of real economy and the project of formacion (producing radical labour power).
It seems to me that a shift is at stake, in what Raymond Williams called **structure of feeling**; or rather, a radical shift in our capacity to *recognise and to remake* structures of feeling.
SoFs are always plural, always ephemeral, inescapably at work ‘in-here’ on the cusp of the mundane dance of action and commitment, in a sea of **inescapably plural ‘in-heres’**; undeniably **out-there** - all as mysterious, inevitable and materially forceful as each other. This is the field where activists work, if they are capable.
Recognising and remaking structures of feeling; this ephemeral stuff is hard stuff.
>Living gracefully within the doughnut *(add a note xxx Raworth)* . . weaving threads of mycelial practice, looming an intimate fabric with the texture of ecology, nary a space between threads.
>Cultivating an aliveness of perception, in-the-moment, in-the-body, in feats of gravity-defying, medal-deserving, mundane emotional gymnastics, as we conduct our ceaseless cycles of feeling, valuing, giving-shape; intending and expecting, wanting and clinging.
> Open to Selfing-and-Othering . . greeding and disdaining and phantasising.
>Open to the plurality of *locations* - a multiplicity of *localness* and inescapably uneven development (of economy, of culture, of freedom) . . open to the plurality of *commitments*: trade, art, research, civil society and community, service, law and order, family; nurture, nature, geopolitical power, a good life well lived; aesthetics, styles, traditions, identities.
>Open to consequences: - *in-here* - as what fires together is wired together - *in this place* - as we furnish our places of living and working, and nail-down those material resources for the duration, however long that may be - *in our elective community* of the like-minded and fellow-travelling - past/present, near/far, known/unknown, tribal/tactica - in our *region-among-regions* - trafficking, balancing, disposing and redisposing, enabling and disabling.
These four divisions - **In-here, Here, We** and **Region** - are the **zones of proximity and reach** ¿1 ¿2 ¿3 ¿4 that furnish the main framing for the cluster's labour of formacion. More below To be added xxx.
This ephemeral stuff is hard stuff. The time of this project is upon us.
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This project maps into Landscape §3 of the foprop frame, 'the aesthetic landscape' weft-3 - aesthetic-landscape wiki 