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- Forms of theory and of formaciòn
> If formacion is education (and this is certainly part of it) then we must expect it to communicate - or provoke - understandings. What kinds of ‘containers’, then, can carry or promote the kinds of understandings that are called for, in the production of activist formations in making a living economy? We tend to think most immediately of verbal containers: published articles or, notably in Robin's case, instances of storytelling.
Here we describe how the landscapes of practice and the zones of reach can generate a 'weave' of imaginative spaces that is rich enough to be a container for a pattern language of activist practice in making a living economy.
From the travelogue of his 2009 Fairtrade conference presentation, and his 2016 life story in a Schumacher podcast, Robin can be seen weaving TWIN with the thread of his own travelling and engaging and sharing, across continents. This bespeaks a well-practised sense of expansive movement across the 'zones of reach' that I refeerred to earlier.
In a 2009 Fairtrade presentation Robin argued that what he called 'networking' was much more important than ’the mechanics of doing the business'. What he went on to illustrate - with photos from his own work in TWIN - was classic labour of 'cultural production', enabling people across many locations in the supply chain to **share stories and concepts**, and share **modes of doing**. This was referred to earlier, in discussing modes of rigour in the dance of knowing. Perhaps this is the social substance of his favoured metaphor of strawberry plants?
I spoke of competing structures of feeling, as carrying altered relations of aesthetic production. Robin had an eye for alternative structures of feeling in the dance of knowing: in conceptualising, storytelling, skills, genres. This propagating of structures of feeling looks to me like the essence of what he spoke of in terms of 'DNA' or the propagating of 'seeds' and 'cells'.
Earlier, discussing class forms of knowledge production, I highlighted the emergent 70s' politics of facilitation - the baby-boomer literacy of enabling self-weaving of forces of production. Robin was familiar with this - for example, from Queenspark Books and from the rank-&-file shop stewards' movement that gave rise to the Lucas stewards' alternative plan - and this was the rationale behind funding 'the grant-funded economy' at the GLC. This literacy is at work in his 'strawberry plants' networking in Fairtrade.
Over on the left side of Cook & Brown's schema, Robin was less involved in the technics of material infrastructure in weaving networks of formacion. In the full chapter I'll consider some kinds of media 'containers', as material infrastructure for activist literacy. In various ways, these go beyond the post-Fordist platform technics of 'the age of Google'.