In 1968, in a folder of conference materials distributed by the Canadian University Service Overseas (cuso) to its “returned volunteers,” I discovered a paper by Ivan Illich. Illich then directed the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, whose avowed purpose was to subvert the contemporary crusade for international development and discourage the sending of volunteers to what were then called developing countries. The paper recorded a talk he had given earlier that year in Chicago to a group of young American volunteers in which he told them, in so many words, to stay home. My superiors at CUSO may have felt that as Canadians we were not included in this injunction, but I took it seriously nonetheless.
At the time I had just returned from a Chinese village in northern Borneo where for two years I had served as a volunteer teacher. A juvenile infatuation with the mystic East had as much to do with my being there as a concern for international development, but the experience had still left me perplexed and unsettled. The village of Kwong Hwa where I lived had recently seen its school converted from Chinese- to English-language instruction. The CUSO volunteer was there to help in the integration of the village school into the Malaysian school system. This made me an unwelcome presence to that part of the community which did not see the abandonment of the Chinese curriculum as progress and disposed me to raise questions about the sense in which my being there constituted development. Illich’s writings were the precipitant around which my questions coalesced.
In 1969, I visited Illich in Cuernavaca, and the next year, along with a group of friends, was able to bring him to Canada for what proved to be the last of the great “international teach-ins” at the University of Toronto. His talk focussed on the emerging question of the environment. He argued that unless the degradation of nature was met by a fundamental change in the orientation of modern societies, environmentalism would only end up spawning a new set of tutelary institutions staffed by a new set of experts in the surveillance and management of daily life. The consequences he predicted now surround a citizenry that has learned to accept that social policy should be based on expert calculations of how far nature can be safely pushed.
After this, I lost touch with Illich, although I continued to be an avid reader of his books. Then, in 1987, I learned that he would be in Toronto for a conference on orality and literacy. The conference brought together scholars in the lineage of Milman Parry, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock, who was present, to discuss the consequences of speech and writing as modes of knowledge. Illich had just completed a book with Barry Sanders called ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind.1 I covered the conference for CBC Radio’s Ideas, where I work, and eventually produced a three-hour series called “Literacy: The Medium and the Message.”2
To assist me in preparing these programs, the conference organizers had obliged the invited speakers to do a recorded interview with me at some point during their stay. I accosted Illich in the lobby of the Windsor Arms Hotel before the conference started. He said that the interview I requested was against his inclination and that he would do it only in deference to his hosts. I recorded the conversation in his room and returned to the temporary studio I had set up in the basement of Emmanuel College, where the conference was to take place. I had checked the tape recorder before beginning the interview and monitored the recording throughout; but, when I put the tape on again, I discovered that it had nothing on it.
Later in the day I approached Illich and made my discomfiture known to him. He hinted that he had hexed the recording and then turned away to greet an old friend. This suggestion, which his magus-like appearance and reputation made at least plausible, left me even more disconcerted. However, I had a job to do, and I doggedly courted Illich until he finally agreed to record a second interview. Our conversation warmed during this second encounter, and, in the course of a discussion of the fate of his ideas on education, I mentioned to him that my three youngest children had never been to school. I then proposed that he allow me to prepare a major radio series based on his ideas, a scheme that I was already incubating when I learned that he was coming to Toronto. He said that he had refused all interviews for more than fifteen years but that, if I wished, I could write to his colleague Wolfgang Sachs about my idea.
The following day I had a chance to introduce Illich to my children, who had come to Emmanuel College to meet me following the conference. I then made my proposal to Wolfgang Sachs as instructed. Several months later I received a reply from Illich. It appeared to have been typed with one hand on the wrong keys of the typewriter, but I was able to make out the unaccountable fact that he had agreed. (He said he had been moved to do so by the feeling he sensed between my children and me.) Later we spoke on the phone, and he told me that he would make himself “obedient” to me. He was as good as his word, but what an interesting and refractory obedience it turned out to be.
I arrived in State College, Pennsylvania, where Illich teaches for part of the year at the Pennsylvania State University, in September of 1988. At the time Illich’s household was taken over by what he and his colleagues called a “living-room consultation,” a gathering of friends from all over to discuss the theme “After Development, What?” (These discussions eventually resulted in the publication of The Development Dictionary,3 an attempt to mark the end of the development era with an anatomy of its key concepts.) From the midst of this gathering, in which I was made welcome and free to participate, Illich and I retired at least once a day to record our interview.
My intention was to survey Illich’s thought, and, to this end, I had carefully reread all of his published works. I quickly learned that this was going to strain Illich’s promised obedience. He wanted to talk about what was on his mind at the moment, rather than be taken step by step through books he had written ten or twenty years before. I was reluctant to forsake my plan and the structure it promised to give to the programs I would eventually have to produce. This tension became one of the constituents of our conversation.
The fact that I was recording the conversation was also a source of tension. “For a quarter of a century,” Illich told an audience in January of 1990, “I have tried to avoid using a microphone ... I refuse to be made into a loudspeaker ... I believe that speaking creates a place [and] place is something precious that has been to a large degree obliterated by the homogeneous space generated by speedy locomotion, standardized planning, screens, and loudspeakers.” Illich told me that he was willing to participate in this doubtful ritual only out of a spontaneous feeling of friendship for me, and his behavior bore him out. He did what I asked but never listened to the five programs that were broadcast in the winter of 1989 under the title “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich.”4
After the broadcast Illich’s close friend Lee Hoinacki, with whom I had already struck up an affectionate acquaintance in State College, asked if he could listen to the raw tapes out of which I had made the programs. Hoinacki has been associated with Illich for more than thirty years, since he was first sent as a Dominican priest serving Puerto Rican parishioners in New York to the Spanish language institute Illich had established in Puerto Rico. He subsequently worked with Illich at CIDOC and has since edited many of his books and articles. After listening to the tapes, he concluded that they constituted a useful supplement to Illich’s published works and, with my permission, he transcribed them with a view to publication. Illich reiterated his lack of interest in the work but gave Hoinacki and me a free hand to do as we saw fit with it. It is largely due to Lee Hoinacki that the present book exists. I would like to dedicate this book to him in gratitude for his generous friendship; for his work in transcribing, editing, and footnoting the interview; for his confidence in the project; and for his graciousness in returning the work to my hands when I decided that I wanted to publish it myself. I would also like to thank Jutta Mason for her help in preparing the manuscript.
I have re-edited the manuscript that Hoinacki created. In his Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Molière pokes fun at M. Jourdain’s astonished discovery that he has been speaking prose all his life; but, in fact, as Northrop Frye liked to point out, few of us consistently speak prose. Speech sprawls and hesitates, leaps to life and then lapses into gestures the tape recorder never hears. Recognizing this, I have tried to prune the interview in a way that reveals its shape without obscuring its origins, discovering precise questions in tentative circumlocutions, turning piled-up phrases into sentences and eliminating dead-ends. Even so, the result is far from linear or purely expository, and the logic is often of the associational speaking-of-this, what-about-that variety. This I have taken for a virtue and left alone.
As a writer, Illich carefully considers his effects; as a speaker he is mercurial, spontaneous and often surprising. Faced with my sometimes clumsy but always determined efforts to arrive at a comprehensive picture of his thought, he found himself sometimes exasperated and sometimes elated, sometimes constrained and sometimes surprised by what he discovered in this constraint. At one point he attacks the staginess of the whole procedure, while at the same time calling it good because it is something he and I have chosen to do together. All this is expressed without inhibition, and I have not tried to censor it.
In places the interview rambles. A question about his first language in a section intended to produce a biographical sketch results in a digression on the recent origins of the ideas of Homo monolinguis, one-languaged man. These, and similar digressions, I have also preserved, because, it seemed to me, that in this case at least the order in which things actually happened was more significant than any order I could have imposed retrospectively. Like a river that is shaped by its landscape even as it shapes that landscape, the interview follows a meandering course through the eight days of my visit to State College. It reflects Illich’s refractory response as much as my continuously revised intentions. Nothing ends quite where I originally expected, and the interview expresses the beginning of an unexpected friendship as much as my desire to make a coherent exposition of Illich’s thought.
What I offer here is vulnerable in a way that the tidier, more intensively edited radio programs that I made for Ideas were not. But it is also more revealing than a retouched portrait would have been. Illich is a man who has managed to outrun his reputation by refusing to become a captive of the positions he has explored and staked out. I came ready to interrogate these positions, only to discover that he had moved on to new ones. Once in the interview my exasperation also shows; but, through Illich, I came to see that real surprise is impossible without what Zen Buddhism calls a beginner’s mind. A beginner’s mind cannot be feigned or deployed as a Socratic technique that allows you to arrive “dialectically” at where you knew you were going all along. It must arise from a genuine curiosity and a genuine disregard for one’s own positions. Illich has this ability, and it has seemed to me worth preserving even where it gives the conversation a darting, digressive, and unfinished quality.
The book is divided into ten chapters, each representing a session together. They usually begin from my intention to discuss one of Illich’s books, and they often end simply where he called a halt as a result of some other obligation. The final chapter, on “life,” was recorded in Bremen in February of 1992, three and a half years later than the rest of the interview. An edited version was broadcast on Ideas on April 30, 1992.5 We had seen a good deal of each other in the intervening years and the tone between us is probably quite noticeably different. I have begun with an essay in which I try to sketch the shape of Illich’s intellectual career and digest the material that is covered, sometimes allusively, in the interview. I hope this will provide a context within which the interview can be read.