In 1938, when he was twelve years old, Ivan Illich walked through the vineyards on the outskirts of Vienna and smelled the fetid wind that, in a few days, would bring Hitler’s troops into Austria and change his world forever. He knew then, he told me, that he would never give children to his grandfather’s house. This house had stood on its island in the Adriatic off the coast of Dalmatia since the Middle Ages. It had seen rulers come and go, and empires rise and fall, but daily life had scarcely changed in the intervening centuries.
The very same olive-wood rafters supported the roof of my grandfather’s house. Water was still gathered from the same stone slabs on the roof. The wine was pressed in the same vats, the fish caught from the same kind of boat ... For the people who lived off the main routes, history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly. Most of the environment was still in the commons. People lived in houses they had built; moved on streets that had been trampled by the feet of their animals; were autonomous in the procurement and disposal of their water; could depend on their own voices.6
All this changed in 1926, the year of Illich’s birth. The same ship that brought the infant to be blessed by his grandfather carried the first loudspeaker ever heard on the island. “Up to that day,” Illich has written, “all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices ... Henceforth access to the microphone would determine whose voice [would] be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete.”7 By 1938 Illich already knew in his bones that the world into which he had been born was vanishing. Soon he would become a wanderer through the uncanny landscapes generated by the loudspeaker’s many progeny. But he did not lose his tap-root into the soil of old Europe or his family’s ancient affiliation with the Roman Church. He took this fading world within himself where it would nourish a stance so radically traditional that for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s excited North American audiences thought it avant-garde.
Illich has often drawn attention to how traditional his views are and to how novel such views can seem in the context of contemporary cultural amnesia. As early as 1959 he introduced an essay called “The Vanishing Clergyman” by saying that he was not writing “anything theologically new, daring, or controversial.” “Only a spelling-out of social consequences,” he went on, “can make a thesis as orthodox as mine sufficiently controversial to be discussed.”8 In these pages, he remarks that today “it’s very difficult to speak about ... things which seem to have been obvious and unquestioned during a thousand years of Western tradition.” “I often have the impression,” he says, “that the more traditionally I speak, the more radically alien I become.”9
I do not make this point at the outset because I want to suggest that Illich is not a man of his time. In fact, the intelligence and sensitivity of his response to the world around him make him, if anything, more a man of his time than many of his more sheltered contemporaries. But what has made Illich so penetrating and so total a critic are his roots in an older soil. He says here, for example, that “it’s good to be very consciously a remainder of the past, one who still survives from another time.”10 On other occasions I have heard him invest history with the crown traditionally worn by theology as “the queen of the sciences.” For Illich, history is the privileged road to “that Archimedean point outside of the present” by which the limitations of the present can be known.11
One often finds Illich’s writings classified in libraries and bookstores as sociology or social criticism, but he is in no sense a sociologist. Even the name of historian, insofar as it evokes the assumptions of a modern positivist science, cannot grasp what he does. Illich is an anomaly among modern scholars because he insists that the habits of the heart are as crucial to scholarship as the habits of the head. He calls the cultivation of the organs of inner sense which root in the heart by its traditional name, ascesis, and says that it is the indispensable complement to critical habits of mind. “For a full millennium,” Illich has written, “the Church cultivated a balanced tradition of study and reflection ... The habits of the heart and the cultivation of its virtues are peripherals to the pursuit of higher learning today ... I want to argue for the possibility of a new complementarity between critical and ascetical learning. I want to reclaim for ascetical theory, method, and discipline a status equal to that the University now assigns to critical and technical disciplines.”12 Ascesis prepares the ground for insight. Without it, insight becomes predatory, self-aggrandizing, one-sided, and, ultimately, heartless. Insight grounded in ascesis, that mental/spiritual grasp which the Middle Ages called intellectus, is the primary mode of Illich’s writing. Illich draws on modern social sciences and scrupulously observes their academic conventions; but, in the end, what he practises is closer to cultural “second sight” than to sociology.
Illich’s close friend and collaborator Lee Hoinacki originally transcribed the interview that follows in the belief that a portrait of Illich in conversation might lead to greater understanding of his written works. In a draft introduction he wrote before I took over editing the book, Hoinacki quoted the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s comment, in The Tragic Sense of Life, that the inner biography of a thinker is that “which can mean most to us.” Hoinacki has offered courses in Illich’s work at several universities and knows how persistently this work has been misunderstood. I share his confidence that some attention to the biographical dimension in Illich’s work can help to clarify it. In calling this dimension biographical, I do not mean in any sense to refer to private life but to the unique and fateful signature each one of us bears. Just as the style of a familiar composer is unmistakable even in an unfamiliar piece, an author has his characteristic voice, and no voice in our time has been more distinct than Illich’s. But, as the assumptions that support his stance wash out of public discussion, there is a possibility that this stance will remain attractively exotic without any longer being understood. Under these circumstances a biographical examination can yield a sense of the wholeness and consistency of Illich’s work, as well as a revelation of its deep roots. Illich has always written with precise purpose and limited aim; different audiences and different occasions have evoked very different responses. He has published no summa. A patchwork interview will hardly substitute for one, but it may help to place his work in the context of that inner biography which Unamuno says can mean most to us.
Ivan Illich arrived in New York at the beginning of the 1950s as a refugee from Church politics. Apt in every way for a career as a prince of the Church, he instead asked Cardinal Spellman to assign him to a parish in uptown Manhattan with a growing population of Puerto Rican immigrants. In this way, and not for the last time, he wriggled out of a destiny designed for him by others. The Puerto Rican migration to New York was then in full spate, and the older immigrant populations, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, were reacting to the new arrivals with the same prejudice that they had formerly experienced. Illich was scandalized and was soon campaigning to have his parishioners recognized as full members of New York’s Roman Catholic community. His efforts culminated in 1956 in a huge outdoor fiesta. Thirty thousand people flocked to the campus of Fordham University, where Cardinal Spellman said mass for the feast day of San Juan, the patron saint of Puerto Rico, and the new community manifested itself with a confidence that Illich had helped to engender.
In the same year Illich was transferred to Puerto Rico as vice-rector of the Catholic University at Ponce. There he started an institute to train American priests and religious involved with Puerto Ricans in the United States. Its primary purpose was to teach Spanish, and to teach it with a certain awe at what learning a new language entails. “Properly conducted language learning,” Illich later wrote in the essay “The Eloquence of Silence,” “is one of the few occasions in which an adult can go through a deep experience of poverty, of weakness and of dependence on the good will of another.”13 Lee Hoinacki first met Illich as a student at the institute and was deeply impressed by how Illich himself expressed a brisk and worldly competence within an aura of eloquent silence.14
It was also in Puerto Rico that Illich came into contact with the first of the great secular bureaucracies whose pretensions he would make a career of puncturing, the school system. He sat on the board that governed the island’s entire educational establishment and was soon engaged in a full-scale effort to understand what schools do. He came to the conclusion that compulsory education in Puerto Rico constituted “structured injustice.”15 By “putting into parentheses their claim to educate,” he was able to see that schools focussed aspiration on a mirage. In Puerto Rico, at the time Illich began studying the question in the late 1950s, children were already required by law to have more schooling than the state could afford to give them. The worst aspect of this for Illich was that people also learned to blame themselves for failing to achieve the impossible. “Schooling,” he concluded, “served ... to compound the native poverty of half the children with a new interiorized sense of guilt for not having made it.”
Over the next fifteen years, Illich refined his analysis of schooling and extended its scope. In the late 1960s he published “The Futility of Schooling in Latin America”16 and then, in 1971, his book Deschooling Society.17 Early on in his research in Puerto Rico he had noticed how schools thwart the very objective at which they ostensibly aim, equality of opportunity, by monopolizing education and pricing it out of reach of the majority. In Deschooling Society he identified schooling as the fundamental ritual of a consumer society. Schole, the Greek word from which ours derives, means leisure, and true learning, according to Illich, can only be the leisured pursuit of free people. The claim that a liberal society can be built on a compulsory and coercive ritual is therefore paradoxical. By designing and packaging knowledge, schools generate the belief that knowledge must be acquired in graded and certified sequences. And this monopoly of schools over the very definition of education, Illich argued, not only inhibits alternatives but also leads to life-long dependence on other service monopolies.
By describing schooling as a ritual, and calling for its disestablishment, Illich recognized an analogy between schools and Western society’s original alma mater, the Church. (The Church as the prototype of all subsequent service bureaucracies, and sacramental theology as the source of our unique confidence in technique, continue to be major themes of Illich’s reflection.)18 “The school system today,” he wrote, “performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of the society’s myth, the institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.”19 Schools, in other words, foster a belief in unending progress, manifest the impossibility of that goal, and then explain that our failure to achieve it is our own fault.
In calling for the disestablishment of education, Illich did not speak against the feasibility of schooling as such, but against making participation in this ritual a precondition for other forms of social participation. Refusing a job to an unschooled person who is otherwise competent to do it, he said, should be as unconstitutional as discriminating against that person on any other grounds. Disestablishment of churches had a salutary effect on Christianity, he concluded; perhaps it would have an equally beneficial effect on education.
Deschooling Society ended with the essay “The Rebirth of Epimethean Man,” in which Illich retold the Greek myth of the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus, whose name means foresight, stole fire from the gods and gave it to the people on earth. By doing so, “Prometheus turned facts into problems, called necessity into question and defied fate.”20 His brother Epimetheus, whose name means hindsight, was given the reputation of a dullard by Hesiod and later Greek writers. Epimetheus went against the advice of his brother and married Pandora, who had let all life’s ills out of her box and trapped only Hope when she closed the lid.21 Prometheus, according to the myth, invoked Nemesis by usurping the prerogative of the gods. “Classical man,” wrote Illich, “was aware that he could defy fate-nature-environment, but only at his own risk ... Contemporary man goes further: he attempts to create a world in his own image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.” He therefore proposed that we should emulate Epimetheus, who embraced the foolish Pandora and her one remaining gift of Hope. “Hope, in its strong sense, means [a] trusting faith in the goodness of nature, while expectation, as I will use it here, means reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man. Hope centres desire on a person from whom we await a gift. Expectation looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process which will produce what we have the right to claim. The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope.” In the case of schooling, Illich claimed that we are now gripped by “pedagogical hubris,” which seeks to replace the perpetual but unpredictable possibility of learning with a certified process based on the pretension that “Man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.”22
The scope of the argument in Deschooling Society extended far beyond the question of schools as such. In fact, Illich made no objection to the existence of schools so long as they were recognized as privileged enclaves and did not monopolize public choice. His book was founded on a vision of freedom from envy, from addictive dependence, and from what he then called “the institutionalization of values.”23 What began as an analysis of the specific effects of schooling in Puerto Rico became a critique of the whole range of ideas, practices, and institutions implicated in the term development. This was carried on at what became the Center for Intercultural Documentation, or CIDOC, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which Illich established in 1961, the year after he left Puerto Rico. In the same year, U.S. president John Kennedy unveiled his Alliance for Progress, an ambitious development assistance program for Latin America, and Pope John Paul XXIII called on the North American Church to send fully ten percent of its strength to Latin America as missionaries. The Peace Corps was created and, in Canada, the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). Barbara Ward launched CBC Radio’s annual Massey Lectures with The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations. Development became the desideratum of progressive politics and the moral polestar of international relations. The center in Cuernavaca was set up to contradict this entire crusade.
In retrospect Illich’s critique of development can be seen as clairvoyant; at the time it deeply offended the conventional wisdom. Illich described development as “a war on subsistence” and argued that it would disrupt the existing adaptations of peoples to their circumstances without furnishing any real alternative. “Rich nations,” he wrote in 1968, “now benevolently impose a straitjacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements and classrooms on the poor nations and by international agreement call this ’development.’”24 According to Illich, this way of designing development was not only inherently unfeasible — “there is not enough money in the world for development to succeed along these lines”25 — it also disabled people’s capacity to imagine possible alternatives and generated “underdevelopment as a form of consciousness” which occurs with “the translation of thirst into the need for a Coke.”26 The result, he predicted, would be a condition of “modernized poverty” that would shatter the dignity of subsistence without softening its asperity and replace the tolerable burden of necessity with the intolerable prick of reified needs.
Illich pursued his campaign against development with particular vigor in the Roman Catholic Church, where he already had an audience and a shared tradition of anti-economic thought to which he could appeal. Although he had always insisted on his theological conservatism and behaved as the “humble and obedient son” he called himself in an open letter to Pope Paul in September of 1970, 27Illich had never spared the vanity of the Church as a worldly institution. In 1959, in his essay “The Vanishing Clergyman,” he called on the Church to embrace secularization, dismantle its bureaucracy, forgo political power, and become once again the celebrant of religious mysteries.28 The idea that the Church can bear having power because it is too humble and self-critical to abuse it, he said in another early essay, is a “fatal and complacent delusion.”29 In 1960 he was ordered out of Puerto Rico by Bishop James McManus when he denounced the intervention of the Catholic hierarchy in Puerto Rican politics on the issue of birth control.30
CIDOC, with its open opposition to the Church’s missionary effort in Latin America, was equally controversial. Illich offended both the Catholic left who wanted to throw the Church’s weight into political revolution — Jesuit activist Dan Berrigan acused him of “intellectual violence aimed at our religious left”31 — and the Catholic right in Mexico who censured the Bishop of Cuernavaca for associating with “that strange, devious and slippery personage, crawling with indefinable nationalities who is called, or claims to be called, Ivan Illich.”32 Despite his reticence about some of the events of those years — in these pages he speaks in passing of having been “shot at and beaten up with chains” but then deflects my desire to know more33 — it is clear that he had enemies on both the political and the ecclesiastical right.
Since 1956, when he had assumed an official position at the university in Ponce, Illich had “refused to preside over a Christian congregation”34 and tried to make it clear that, on political subjects, he did not speak as a churchman, but the distinction seemed lost on Rome. Shortly after his superior, and loyal defender, Cardinal Spellman died in 1967, he was summoned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. There he was confronted with an anonymous and tendentious questionnaire, full of rumor and innuendo. It inquired about everything from his relations with Octavio Paz to his views on limbo. Since he was being asked, in effect, whether he had stopped beating his wife, Illich refused to answer. He returned to Cuernavaca and said nothing about what had happened in Rome. Six months later Rome put an interdict on CIDOC and forbade its bishops and religious superiors to send their subjects there. Illich wrote to Spellman’s successor, Terence Cooke, of his “irrevocable decision to resign entirely from Church service, to suspend the exercise of priestly functions, and to renounce totally all titles, offices, benefits and privileges which are due to me as a cleric.”35
The ban was revoked in 1969, and CIDOC continued under Illich’s leadership until 1976, when he and his staff voluntarily closed it down. Between 1966 and 1976 it added to its language school an excellent library, an ambitious publishing program, and a series of research seminars that attracted thinkers interested in alternatives, CIDOC was one of the epicenters of the intellectual ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Intergenerational resentments, an oppressive legend, and twenty-twenty hindsight have all tended to obscure the character of this time, but Illich remembers “a real sense of renewal” and people who “sought this renewal through giving themselves totally to the possibility of making a new society, right now!”36 This atmosphere is tangible in Illich’s writings of the time. Although many of his essays evoke a frightening vision of dazed and disabled populations, cut off from nourishing contact with nature and other persons by packaged goods and services, they also make a vivid appeal to the possibility of political change. “The mood of 1971,” Illich wrote at the end of Deschooling Society, “is propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future.”37
Illich’s pivotal book of this period was Tools for Conviviality, published in 1973 and intended as “an epilogue to the industrial age.”38 In this essay, he outlined a philosophy of technology and a constitution of limits for modern societies. This was the time when the Club of Rome was also pursuing the idea of limits to growth and the fledgling environmental movement was discussing how to restrain the industrial system. Illich made it clear that he was speaking in a different sense and tried to introduce a vital and, in the event, prescient distinction into the discussion. He said that managing the growth of tools would only stabilize the industrial age “at the highest endurable level of output.”39 Even retrofitting industrial societies with clean technologies would fail as long it took only the physical dimension of the problem into acount. In order to bring technology into harmony with social life, Illich claimed, it would be necessary to understand much more precisely both the nature of tools and their multidimensional interaction with nature and society.
Illich chose the word tools because he found it both more homely and more pointed than the conventional and abstract technology, but he used the term in a sense in which a hammer, a highway, or a health-care system could all equally be described as tools. He argued that tools go through two watersheds, a first at which they become productive and a second at which they become counterproductive and turn from means into ends in themselves. Up to a certain speed and density automobiles may expand mobility, but beyond this threshold society becomes their prisoner. Broad-scale improvements in sanitation may improve public health, while high-tech medicine generates social costs that far outweigh its benefits. Drawing on the work of Leopold Kohr, who pioneered a philosophy of social size,40 Illich claimed that “to each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales ... In each of these dimensions,” he went on, “tools that require time periods or space or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional.”41
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.42
Illich tried to direct attention away from the Marxist preoccupation with the control of production and towards its structure. In this sense he belongs to the school of Kohr and E.F. Schumacher, who tried to make the scale of technology an independent issue, and to the school of Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan, who highlighted the symbolic fallout of technology.43 Illich suggested that charting policy options on a left-right political spectrum would yield only a choice of tyrannies unless they were also graphed on an institutional spectrum running from conviviality to radical monopoly. Convivial tools foster “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons” and “individual freedom realized in personal inter-dependence”;44 radical monopolies force us to use them by generating environments in which we cannot live without using them. Libraries, telephone exchanges, bicycles, and all-purpose roads are obvious utilities that do not dictate how we shall use them; high-speed transportation compels our allegiance by adjusting time and space to its own dimensions. “Highly capitalized tools,” said Illich, “require highly capitalized men.”45
Tools for Conviviality presents a vision of a chastened modernity in which austerity is seen as the condition of enjoyment. Illich quotes Aquinas, who defines austerity in the Summa Theologica as “a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness.” Illich sees the choice of austerity, or self-limitation, as the only alternative to intensified surveillance and management by technocratic elites; and, in this sense, the book has a disturbingly apocalyptic undertow. In fact Illich explicitly predicts a “gruesome apocalypse” if society does not master its tools. “The balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset,” he says, and “society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation ... An unlimited rate of change makes lawful community meaningless . . . engineered obsolescence can break all bridges to a normative past.”46
Twenty years after it was written, when children grow up among the phantasmal threats of global warming and ozone depletion, Tools for Conviviality reminds its readers of a road not taken. What Illich prophesied has happened. The Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit” of 1992 is not about finding a way of life that is simple in means and rich in ends; it is about the equitable division of pollution optimums under the aegis of global monitoring. Simple survival has become the most commonly expressed motive for political action in defense of the environment. Illich suggested that the degradation of nature is rooted in “a corruption in man’s self-image”47 and that, therefore, “the only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they could be happier if they could work together and care for each other.”48 Today, the idea that conservation might be intrinsic to the dignity of human nature and not just a requirement for survival is absent from discussions that focus on clean-up, careful consumption, and control. Impossible ideas of responsibility for the planet are enjoined on people, but it is only rarely mentioned that the same tools that damage nature also injure social relations. Rapid transportation, according to Illich, puts society into a speed coma long before its by-products begin to alter the atmosphere, and this insight can show us much better reasons for restricting the compass of technique than the maddening desideratum to “manage planet earth.”
Illich followed Tools for Conviviality with two further explorations of “paradoxical counterproductivity.” Energy and Equity (1974) pursued the question into the domain of transportation and traffic. It argued that high energy consumption inevitably overpowers and degrades social relations and proposed the bicycle as the epitome of conviviality. Bicycles incorporate sophisticated materials and engineering while operating at nontraumatic speeds and leaving civic space safe, quiet, and clean. One person who uses a bicycle does not constrain others from doing the same; the more people who use cars, the less useful cars become. Medical Nemesis (1975), which was republished in 1976 in an expanded form as Limits to Medicine, proposed that medicalization of health beyond a certain intensity increases suffering by reducing the capacity to suffer and destroying “the community setting in which suffering can become a dignified performance.”49 Published at a time when medical power was already under sustained popular assault, Limits to Medicine was arguably Illich’s most influential book and, along with Deschooling Society, the one most often cited by readers for whom Illich is a name from the past.
During the period of his career that ended with the closing of CIDOC in 1976, Illich was concerned with hedging and demystifying the power of “dominant professions.” He argued that old liberal professions, like law or medicine, had concentrated privilege without making their services mandatory. Dominant professions were protection rackets, legal monopolies licensed to serve the needs they had imputed to their clients. Grave-diggers, he wrote, “did not become members of a profession by calling themselves morticians, by obtaining college credentials, by raising their incomes, or by getting rid of the odor attached to their trade by electing one of themselves president of the Lions Club. Morticians formed a profession, a dominant and disabling one, when they acquired the muscle to have the police stop your burial if you are not embalmed and boxed by them.” In the era of dominant professions, needs become “the off-print of a professional pattern” and ignorance of one’s needs “the unforgivable antisocial act.”50
Illich’s work helped to inspire emergent citizens’ movements with the confidence to challenge professional expertise. “In the sixties,” he wrote in 1977, “lay opposition to legislation based upon expert opinion still sounded like anti-scientific bigotry. Today lay confidence in public policies based upon the expert’s opinion is tenuous indeed. Thousands now reach their own judgments and, at great cost, engage in citizen action without any professional tutorship; they gain the scientific information they need through personal, independent effort.”51 But even as he observed this heartening development, Illich also observed a countertendency for people to internalize the categories of professional dominance and, in effect, administer care to themselves.
Ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, the venerable British medical journal The Lancet asked Illich to commemorate the anniversary by reflecting on the changes he had seen in the intervening years. Illich responded with an article in which he said that he would no longer claim, as he did in the first sentence of Medical Nemesis, that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” The major threat today, he wrote, is the “pathogenic pursuit” of health itself.52 In Medical Nemesis Illich several times used the term self-care to denote an alternative to professional care; ten years later he winced to see that, in practice, self-care had come to mean not people’s ability “to suffer their own reality”53 or “bear their uniqueness”54 but a condition of total self-administered patienthood. He was not dissatisfied with his text, he said, insofar as it described the ways in which medicine had reshaped the experience of pain, disease, disability, and death. “But I am distressed,” he said, “that I was blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic [i.e., physician-caused] effect — the iatrogenesis of the body itself. I overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of our bodies and our selves had become the result of medical concepts and cares.” Failing to see this, he went on, he had also missed the contemporary transformation of the medically objectified body-as-machine into “a body percept congruent with a post-professional, high-tech lifestyle,”55 the body-as-system.
Illich’s revision of what he had written in Medical Nemesis was only part of a broadening and deepening of his thought that had begun even before that book was published. In 1971, on the eve of the publication of Deschooling Society, he had become aware that, if his critique was understood as pertaining to schools per se, it could be used to bolster the efforts of reformers intent on “the transformation of all society into one huge classroom.” In response he began to pose the myth of education itself, and not just schooling, as the problem, noting that “the reformed classroom, the free classroom and the worldwide classroom represent three stages in a proposed escalation of education in which each step threatens more subtle and more pervasive social control than the one it replaces.”56
By the early seventeenth century a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with “education.” Education came to mean the inverse of vital competence. It came to mean a process rather than the plain knowledge of the facts and the ability to use tools which shape a man’s concrete life. Education came to mean an intangible commodity that had to be produced for the benefit of all, and imparted to them in the manner in which the visible Church formerly imparted invisible grace. Justification in the sight of society became the first necessity for a man born in original stupidity, analogous to original sin.57
Identifying an embracing myth of education did not represent a change of direction so much as a change of emphasis for Illich. He had identified schooling as “a mythopoetic ritual” from the very outset. But what he did come to see was how easily his own proposals for reform could be used to consolidate rather than dispel this myth: how “home-schooling” or “self-care” might become total concepts, signifying a much more insidious institutionalization of the myths of education and health than schools or hospitals, and dissolving the boundary between individuals and systems in a way precisely opposite to the autonomous expression of personal meaning that Illich had hoped to foster. Recognizing this, he began to seek the source of those “certainties” which can turn even deschooling into education. What endows the idea of education with the tremendous inertial power it obviously possesses? Under what conditions can an idea so alien to other times and places even arise?
These were the questions that would occupy the second, less celebrated half of Illich’s career as a thinker and writer. He immediately identified scarcity as one of the key assumptions he wanted to examine. Education, for example, he defined as “learning under the assumption of scarcity.” Books may be plentiful and the world endlessly informative; but, by being husbanded in specialized institutions, education is kept in short supply. Human beings may be — indeed quite obviously are — innately social, but almost no one questions the plausibility of the claim that schools are necessary for “socialization.” Scarcity is the prototypical certainty: a condition we constantly reproduce by our fervent belief in it. It is the founding assumption of modern economics, which classically defined itself as the study of the allocation of scarce resources to competing uses, and the necessary condition for a world seen as being composed of resources in the first place.
It was Karl Polanyi who made Illich aware how recent, and how anomalous historically, a market society based on scarcity really is.58 Illich began to oppose a sphere of traditional subsistence in which culture still shapes and limits economic life to a sphere of scarcity in which economic values predominate. He first spoke of the gestures through which non-modern peoples represent their sense of the good as “vernacular values,” and then abandoned the term values altogether when he realized that it cast the shadow of economic choice on acts whose essence was, precisely, not choice but unforced attunement to a given environment. Traditional societies, Illich came to see, take stringent precautions against the corrupting effects of exchange relations — they will not allow the unquestionably good to be reduced to monetarized values.59 Modern societies speak of values, and thereby imply that ways of life become worthy or unworthy according to our choice of whether or not to invest in them.
In 1981, under the title of Shadow Work, Illich published five essays, which he presented as drafts “for my major study on the history of scarcity.” This book has never appeared as such, but much of Illich’s work in the 1980s, as well as the work of colleagues whom he inspired, can be considered as comprising the chapters of such a study. In Shadow Work Illich wrote for the first time explicitly as a historian. In order to distinguish Homo economicus “from all other human beings,” he said, “I choose the study of history as the privileged road.”60 The book was founded on a key distinction between economic society and vernacular life. It was written at a time when economists had just discovered “the informal economy” and were beginning to forge concepts and classifiers by which they could analyze it. It was becoming increasingly clear that in most of the world there would never be as many formal jobs as there were people. The reinterpretation of culturally determined activities as self-help within an informal economy opened a new frontier for development economists. Illich called it “the last frontier of arrogance.”
I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable ... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life. The self-help the new economists preach divides the subject of social policy (be it a person or entity) into two halves: one that stands in a professionally defined need, and the other who is professionaly licenced to provide it. Under the policies that are thus labelled as self-help, the apartheid of production and consumption, characteristic of industrial economics, is projected into the subject himself. Each one is turned into a production unit for internal consumption, and the utility derived from this masturbation is then added to a newfangled GNP. Unless we clarify the distinction between this self-help and what I shall call vernacular life, the shadow economy will become the main growth sector during the current stagflation, the “informal” sector will become the main colony which sustains a last flurry of growth. And, unless the apostles of new life styles, of decentralization and alternative technology and con-scientization and liberation make this distinction explicit and practical, they will only add some color, sweetener and the taste of stagnant ideals to an irresistibly spreading shadow economy.61
Illich defined shadow work as the unpaid labor necessary to sustain a commodity-intensive society based on jobs. Getting to one’s job, shopping, and similar activities required to make commodities serviceable are forms of shadow work. Illich adopted the term in preference, say, to the Marxian concept of reproduction because he wanted to emphasize the shadow cast by a monetarized, commodity-intensive way of life. He stated clearly that he was not trying to make an idol of “traditional subsistence ... structured by immemorial cultural transmission,” which he said would be “sentimental and destructive.”62 Rather, he was trying to introduce critical distinctions into discussions of public policy. To the right-left axis on which political choices are usually charted, he suggested adding a y-axis representing the choice of hard or soft technologies and a z-axis running from commodity-intensity to subsistence. This type of dimensional analysis, he said, would have the advantage of starting from the undeniable reality that most people will never have jobs. It would draw limits to markets, foster “the right to useful unemployment,”63 and protect subsistence activities, or activities undertaken for their own sake, from the infection by economic assumptions that results when monetarized values are attached to things done from necessity or love. A passage in a more recent essay illustrates Illich’s distinction and the danger of not heeding it:
Notwithstanding the high levels of modernization in Japan, most parents with children over 35 count on the blessing of old age within the household. Economists can calculate how much is saved by domestic care in comparison with what a bed and upkeep in an old people’s home would cost. However, the language of economics is unfit to express either the boon or the burden experienced daily in the four-generation household by its members ... The consequences of utility choices made by an economic actor under the assumption of scarcity are something quite different from the immediacy of loving this person.
The needs discourse uproots grandmother from the household of which she had so far been a part ... When she is then turned into a subject within the needs discourse, a new person, a senex economicus comes into being. This new person is a stranger who by somebody’s choice is hospitalized in her own bed. The household henceforth is experienced as a center of care. Grandmother from now on receives what she needs as an old woman. She no longer simply receives her due, irrespective of any claim based on an economically definable need.
During the early eighties, the needs discourse disembedded millions of elderly Japanese from the context of experience which up to then had defined both their status and the household. Even the current Japanese economy is unprepared to meet the needs which were created by this reinterpretation of age within an economic rather than a cultural context. Last year a high-level Japanese mission journeyed to Mexico. It came to negotiate an agreement which would allow Japanese enterprises to open one million beds for the disposal of aging Japanese in a tropical climate, and offered in exchange an industrial development package. The elderly, formerly experienced as a boon and a burden, were turned into a disvalue for the economy.64
Illich’s effort to add nuance to economic analysis and mark definite limits to its application was motivated by his observation that “the public discussion on the limits to growth” was then entering a third stage. The first stage had focussed on physical limits, the second on limits to institutional services, “the third is focussing on the commons.”65 In this third stage there had begun to be wide recognition that development destroys the usefulness of the environment. Whether it is logging that ruins the subsistence of a forest people, or high-density traffic that deprives urban people of a streetscape which formerly provided a convivial setting for social life, the pattern is the same: a public good becomes a private resource and a formerly useful place is rendered inhospitable. “Up to now,” Illich says, “economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it ... Economic development has also meant that after a time people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social or cultural environment.”66 Being deprived of the commons without access to the commodities that replaced it is the bad bargain that Illich called “modernized poverty.” Shadow Work was an attempt to conserve what was left and remove emergent post-industrial forms of subsistence from the petrifying shadow of scarcity.67
One of the ways Illich tried to distinguish the sphere of subsistence from the sphere of scarcity was by developing a contrast between vernacular speech and taught mother tongue. Illich had always been interested in words and had chosen them with a fine sense of their tangibility and taste. In Tools for Conviviality he had spoken of the importance of “the critical use of ordinary language,” and his own writings demonstrate how plain words can yield fresh sense in careful hands. In his essays on language in Shadow Work he describes the modernization of the West as the gradual colonization and domestication of vernacular speech by standard forms. In premodern Europe, and even yet in much of the world, there is no such thing as a mother tongue, let alone a perceived need to teach it to people. “The poor in non-industrial countries all over the world are polyglot. My friend the goldsmith in Timbuktu speaks Songhay at home, listens to Bambara on the radio, devotedly and with some understanding says his prayers five times a day in Arabic, gets along in two trade languages on the Souk, converses in passable French that he picked up in the army — and none of these languages was formally taught to him. He did not set out to learn these tongues: each is one style in which he remembers a peculiar set of experiences that fits into the frame of that language.”68
Out of this vibrant matrix there gradually precipitated official languages, which can be guarded in the national academies of old nations and manufactured in the language institutes of new ones. Illich finds one of the epochs in this history in the work of the Spanish grammarian Antonio Nebrija, who, in the same year that Columbus sailed west, approached Queen Isabella with his proposal to create a language from the many speech forms he encountered among the people of Spain.69 Grammar had previously been thought applicable to dead languages but in no way pertinent to living ones. Nebrija advised the queen that the language he intended to engineer by stabilizing the “loose and unruly” speech of her people would be invaluable as a tool of popular edification and administrative control. She demurred on the ground that her sovereignty did not extend to the speech of her subjects who were already perfectly in command of their own tongues, but it was Nebrija with his “declaration of war against subsistence” who had the future in his bones. Today it is a certainty that children should be taught the proper forms of everyday speech, and teachers should be paid to deliver this commodity. Elements of home-grown speech recur, like weeds growing through the cracks in pavement, in the mouths of poets and dropouts, but speech that is designed, packaged, and administered predominates.
The year after Shadow Work appeared, Illich published Gender, another study of the European vernacular. His curiosity piqued by his encounter with the reflections of feminist scholars on the history of women’s work, he had begun himself to delve into the history of how work had been perceived and made a surprising discovery. Wherever he looked in the past, he could find no trace of work as such, but only men’s work or women’s work. A demanding line, he noticed, ran through the tool kit of every non-modern society, “separating tools men may grasp from tools women can grasp.”70 The same line separated customs and living spaces. The idea of a human being who is prior to all socially assigned “roles” and only accidentally sexed, he concluded, must be uniquely modern. All previous societies were constituted of two asymmetrical but complementary domains. It followed that the transition from traditional to modern society, which Karl Polanyi had described in terms of the disembedding of market relations from the soil of culture and custom,71 could also be described anthropologically as “the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex.”72
So long as men and women were considered to be of different kinds, the abstract categories of modern political economy could gain no purchase. In modern society money is a universal solvent. It “confounds and exchanges all things,” Marx says, and this implies a world of one substance in which all things are ideally interconvertible. Gender is the sign of a heterogeneous world in which the fact that men and women cannot be interchanged blocks the emergence of any universal category. “Vernacular speech, gender and subsistence,” Illich says, “are characteristic of a morphological closure of community life on the asumption implicit and often ritually expressed that a community, like a body, cannot outgrow its size. Taught mother-tongue, sex and a lifestyle based on the consumption of commodities all rest on the assumption of an open universe in which scarcity underlies all correlations between needs and means.”73
Gender, unlike sex, is a social rather than a biological construct. Gendered domains vary by society — what only men may do in one place, only women may do in another — but what is constant is the exclusion of competition, or invidious comparison, by the principle of complementarity. Gender contradicts the contemporary idea that men and women share a human identity that is prior to all differences beween them. It belongs to a worldview in which an irreducible experience of otherness is fundamental to being alive. Wherever I stand, there is something that remains out of reach, something that “I can know about only through its reflection in the opposite gender’s words, looks and actions.”74 There is something I can never do, something I can never know, an interdependence I can never overcome, a gulf that only metaphor can represent and only imagination can bridge. Gender, in Illich’s account, represents an epistemological, as well as a social, style, a way of knowing that finds an impassable limit in the dualistic character of reality itself. In an age in which the earth is comprehended at a glance, and the possibility of a “planetary culture” is no longer considered a contradiction in terms, it is at least sobering to remember a way of knowing in which otherness was constitutive of the being of things.
Illich, despite what his critics claimed, does not fantasize in his book about a return to the past. He does offer a disciplined and documented account of what gender was, as a way of standing outside the present and seeing it with a vision sharpened by the knowledge of a profoundly different past. He does contradict any effort to construct “a central perspective” based on the normatively human within the social sciences by insisting that “only non-scientific research that uses analogy, metaphor and poetry can reach for gendered reality.”75 And he does suggest that we cherish what he calls “the rests of gender,” a phrase by which he suggests not just what remains, but also what refreshes us in our lives as modern economic neuters.
Gender was explicitly not a book about patriarchy. The division of society into complementary domains can occur in circumstances where men predominate, where women predominate, or where power is balanced. “In this essay,” Illich says, “I have not tried to explain why society places the man on top and the handicap on women.” What he did assert was that sexism could occur only under genderless conditions. The claim of discrimination on the basis of sex supposes that a presumed equality between the sexes has been violated. Where men and women are incommensurable beings no such claim can exist. Once it does, Illich says, the majority of women will be worse off than before because they will be exposed to unlimited competition with men. “Under the reign of gender, men and women collectively depend on each other; their mutual dependence sets limits to struggle, exploitation and defeat. Vernacular culture is a truce between genders, and sometimes a cruel one ... In contrast to this truce, the regime of scarcity imposes continued war and ever new kinds of defeat on each woman. While under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only the second sex.” Sexism and patriarchy, in other words, are separate questions, but confusion between them will persist so long as feminist historians attempt “to reconstruct the past ... with concepts mined in utopia.”76
Gender constituted a powerful critique of feminism. It claimed that feminist scholarship was engaged in a fruitless and deceptive attempt to comprehend an utterly foreign past within the ideological categories of the present — “putting on the hand-me-down Marxoid categories discarded by social historians,” was Illich’s tart phrase. It also claimed that the goal of feminism’s legislative program, equality, was a will-of-the-wisp. “The struggle to create economic equality between genderless humans of two different sexes,” Illich wrote, “resembles the efforts made to square the circle with a ruler and straight edge.”77 The harder this struggle was pressed, Illich argued, the more paradoxical would be its results.
Because of the particular ways in which they are injured by the genderless assumptions of a purely economic society, he said, women would have been uniquely placed to undertake “a radical questioning of the categories of economics, of sociology and of anthropology.”78 By opting instead for legally engineered equality within these categories, feminists have committed themselves to creating a liberal utopia of frictionless universal competition. According to Illich, the results of this final spasm of Western revolutionary zeal, now increasingly structured as part of “development” under the banner of “global feminism,” will be the same as the results of previous development crusades: greater privileges for a few, and greater degradation for the majority. This majority will find itself confined in what Illich’s colleague Barbara Duden calls a “double ghetto,” removed from the protection of gender with the promise of equality still undelivered. “The era of scarcity could come to be,” Illich said, “only on the assumption that ’man’ is individual, possessive, and, in the matter of material survival, genderless.”79 It follows that reflection on gender, and careful attention to the seeds of possibility that lie hidden in its traces, might have led to a fundamental challenge to this assumption. Instead, numbers of people now seem to have arrived at the notion that economic society is a perverse by-product of testosterone, which generates as a corollary the idea of woman as man with a difference, Homo economicus with a moral halo.
Gender took Illich into new territory, but his thesis remained entirely consistent with his previous writings. He had based himself from the outset on the assumption that development was a doomed enterprise, jobs for all a destructive utopia, and the monopoly of commodities over satisfaction a prescription for envy and frustration. With Gender he hoped to show that, insofar as sexism is the inevitable by-product of an industrial mode of production, “the fight against sexism converges with efforts to reduce environmental destruction and endeavours to challenge the radical monopoly of goods and services over needs.” Contraction of the economy and recovery of the commons, he said, were the common conditions for the success of all three movements. Illich claimed no clairvoyance about the shape of a new commons and, typically, refused on principle “to allow the shadow of the future to fall on the concepts with which I try to grasp what is and has been.” But he did hold out hope that “a contemporary art of living can be recovered” and concluded that “the hope for such a life rests upon the rejection of sentimentality and on openness to surprise.”80
Gender was easily the most vilified of Illich’s books. Review after review dismissed him as a romantic or a reactionary or both; and the tone of these reviews suggested, to me at least, that even if Illich’s text had been more tactful and less astringent than it was, it would have made little difference. Seven such commentaries were published in the spring of 1983 in the journal Feminist Issues.81 Illich had used the text of Gender as the basis for a series of lectures he gave in Berkeley in 1982, and these seven critiques were responses recorded at a symposium held after the lectures had finished. What is most striking about them is not that the feminist scholars who spoke disagreed with Illich but the extent to which they misrepresented his argument. He was accused of dressing ideology up as science when he had said explicitly that he was taking a non-scientific stance; he was accused of portraying gender as part of the natural order, as if he were a closet sociobiologist, when his whole argument depended on the recognition that gender was a vanishing and highly variable cultural construct; and he was accused of wanting to return to the past when he had tried to make clear that he viewed his text as a contribution to current discussion on the limits to growth. Robin Lakoff even claimed that “all the salient features of modern propaganda, as exemplified in classics of the genre, like Mein Kampf, are to be found in Gender.” Of the seven critics only one, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, challenged Illich’s evidence. The rest offered only ad hominem (ad feminam?) arguments and relied on ideological prejudice for their conclusion that Illich must be wrong.
I mention Feminist Issues because I was shocked by the extent to which his critics misrepresented Illich and by the indication that feminist dogmatics may now block even discussion of the question Illich wanted to raise. I also believe, on the basis of several conversations with people who told me they disagreed with Gender without having read it, that the Feminist Issues critique has been influential. For years I have looked in vain for references to Illich’s book in other works to which its argument would have been germane. It is sad, I think, that a book which might have been a source of renewed friendship and respect between men and women became instead a source of controversy and then, after virtually introducing the now pervasive term gender into public discussion, itself slipped from sight.
There is a thread that still connects Gender to Illich’s books of the 1970s. His subsequent works display a new dimension, which is revealed in his remark to me that “in the mid-1980s there has been a change in the mental space in which many people live.” “The subject of my writing,” he said, “has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are ... passing over a watershed. I had not expected, in my lifetime, to observe this passage.”82 This change can be expressed, in shorthand, as the transition from a textual to a cybernetic image of the self. Illich became increasingly aware of it as he shifted his focus from the question of what tools do to a society, which he had pursued in Tools for Conviviality, to the question of what tools say to people about who they are—technology’s symbolic fallout, as McLuhan called it. He concluded that the computer had now replaced the book as “the root metaphor of the age.”83
In ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Illich and his co-author, Barry Sanders, tried to gain perspective on the catastrophic change they sensed around them by exploring two comparable historical watersheds: the transition from epic orality to literacy in ancient Greece, and the appearance of a recognizable ancestor of the modern book in twelfth-century Europe. Such scholars as Milman Parry and Eric Havelock had reflected on the momentous changes in consciousness that occurred when the technique of alphabetic literacy created visible words out of the irretrievable river of speech, and an entirely new kind of thought became possible.84 Illich’s original research focussed on the twelfth century, where he studied changes in the appearance of the medieval book. In the manuscripts of the early Middle Ages, words were unseparated. In order to tease the words out of a continuous line of letters, it was necessary to read aloud, and numerous accounts agree that the monks and Church fathers buzzed and mumbled as they read. Reading was a laborious activity by which the reader physically embodied the words he first tasted on his tongue — “Let the reader seek for savour, not science,” said a Cistercian monk of the time.85 According to Dom Jean Leclercq, “Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level with walking, running or ball-playing.”86
Words were occasionally separated as early as the eighth century; but, in the twelfth century, the practice became general and converged with a host of other changes. Chapters were given titles and subtitles; quotations were marked; paragraphs, marginal glosses, tables of contents, and alphabetical indices were all added. Books could now be consulted for reference as well as for reading. Libraries with books set out on shelves came into existence, and monasteries began to catalogue their holdings.
Illich believes that these changes, taken together, amounted to a revolution. The old book was an overwhelmingly physical object that incorporated the reader into its order, leading the reader on a pilgrimage through its lines. Hugh of St. Victor calls it a vineyard in which he walks, tasting the words as he goes. With the transformed book of the twelfth century, a new reality, which Illich calls the visible text, appeared, hovering above the actual page. The book became “the mirror of a mind,” capable of reflecting an entirely new kind of order and authority. This visible text, says Illich, was something much more than just a new tool for the production of knowledge. It was also a new kind of metaphor, a new way of defining the social and psychological space in which people lived. Illich called this new space “literate mind” or “lay literacy,” and he argued that it changed the world long before most people could read.
Oral society knows no “self” — “Thinking itself takes wing; inseparable from speech, it is never there, always gone.”87 The stability and narrative consistency with which we endow the self is a reflection of textual literacy. Very few people could read and write at the end of the twelfth century, and their number increased only slowly; but, in Illich’s view, even illiterates soon acquired a new textual image of the self. Changes that McLuhan had ascribed to the printing press Illich found, in embryonic form, two centuries earlier. Oaths became writs, and honor became conscience. The Church institutionalized confession by which people produced for a priest the inner inscription of their thoughts and deeds. Authors appeared who were creators and no longer just conservators of culture. Regardless of who possessed the skills of the scribe, the implications of textual literacy penetrated everywhere.
The significance of this idea of “lay literacy” for Illich is in the light it throws on the appearance of a new kind of mind today. To describe it, Illich has borrowed Morris Berman’s term “the cybernetic dream,”88 sometimes transposing it to the cybernetic nightmare. A person today who speaks about getting something out of his “system” locates himself within this new state whether or not he has any aptitude for computers. In calling the computer the “root metaphor” of this new age, Illich does not suppose that the computer has in any simple sense caused it, and his concept of lay literacy emphasizes this point. Ferdinand de Saussure had supposed that language was a system of signs, Alan Turing dreamed of a “universal machine,” Norbert Weiner coined the term cybernetics, and Erwin Schrödinger guessed that even the human genetic stuff is a binary information code long before the existence of even the room-sized Univac became public knowledge in the 1950s.89 If we take Illich’s term watershed in its second sense, in which it represents a whole drainage basin and not just the height of land that defines its boundary, then it is clear, at least in retrospect, that during the course of the twentieth century many tributaries have flowed into the stream that Illich realized in the mid-1980s was now in irresistible flood. He himself recalls the sense of outrage he felt in 1964 when “for the first time in my life I became aware that I was being addressed not as a person but as a transmitter.”90 But, at some point, a change in quantity becomes a change in quality; and, by the time we spoke in 1988, Illich was very much preoccupied by the abstract and disembodied character of the new systems discourse, which was increasingly becoming the source of self-definition in the age of post-textual literacy.
In the Vineyard of the Text, a book now in press, further refines Illich’s approach to the current watershed between text and system as root metaphors by examining in detail the reading of Hugh of St. Victor, who stood at the very cusp of change in the twelfth century. “For decades now,” Illich says at the beginning of the book, “a very special affection has tied me to Hugh of St. Victor, to whom I feel as grateful as I am to the very best of my still living teachers.” Illich first wrote about Hugh in Shadow Work in a wonderful essay called “Research by People,” where he made the claim that Hugh was the “first and last” person in Europe “to have an alternative philosophy of technology.”91 Illich was then trying to define the new dimension of citizen activity he saw opening up amongst people who were doing a type of science that was “critical and public but definitely not Research and Development.”92 He spoke of a type of science that was aimed at creating beauty and comfort for those who do it without sponsorship, access to prestigious journals, or the hope of distribution through supermarkets. His search for precedents led him to Hugh, the abbot of a community of Augustinian canons on the outskirts of twelfth-century Paris. Hugh created a place for what Illich called “critical technology” within philosophy. He saw technology as a remedy for the bodily weakness that is the heritage of Adam and Eve’s fall, and this modest view of technology as a remedial activity allowed him to set clear limits to its application. In Illich’s eyes, Hugh was the first to isolate technology as a subject and the last to insist that it was properly part of philosophy. (The place of village technology in Gandhi’s “constructive program” for India is a close modern analogue.) Within a generation of Hugh’s death, his thoughtful attempt to navigate between fatalistic resignation and an ethos of domination and control had been eclipsed. Philosophy and technology took separate roads. Monasteries became centers of uncritical enthusiasm for new techniques, while, at the same time, what Hugh had called “mechanical science” was being excluded from the new academic curriculum.
In the Vineyard of the Text shows Hugh to have been an equally brilliant anomaly in the history of reading. Today, like Hegel’s owl of Minerva which flies only at twilight, Illich confronts what George Steiner calls “bookish text” in the poignant light of its disappearance as the dominant way of knowing the world. “Only now,” says Illich, “with nature conceived as encoded information, can the history of ’The Readability of the World’ be made into an issue for study.”93 Hugh too stood at the brink of a new age and, in some ways, already belonged to it. St. Victor was a new type of monastery established for the edification of an expanding urban population; and, in his writings, Hugh codifies the practice of monkish reading in order to make it accessible to his townsmen. Hugh was aware and capable of the new practice of silent reading, but what he teaches is still the lectio divina in which “the reader’s order is not imposed on the story but the story puts the reader into its order.” For Hugh the page is still a soil — the material substrate for a journey into nature and God. There, in his pilgrimage towards the light, the reader encounters “creatures who wait to give birth to their meaning.” Reading is an “ontologically remedial technique” that removes the darkness from the eyes of fallen man and restores his capacity to perceive the light that shines from all things. In practising it, we seek not ourselves, but another, who is ultimately Christ.
Hugh was the last for whom lectio divina was the only worthwhile kind of reading. With the emergence of what Illich calls the visible text, the book shrank from cosmic to individual proportions. Bookish text became “the materialization of abstraction.” It still made the book its “port and anchorage” but, at the same time, floated above it. Nature ceased to be the object to be read and became the object to be described. Exegesis and hermeneutics became operations on the text, rather than on the world. The new proto-modern individual no longer belonged to the book — the book belonged to him as the visible object of his thought.
Studying the transition from sacred to scholarly reading enables Illich to clarify certain features of the present. It enables him to see that the type of reading in which he engages as a modern “man of letters” has a historical beginning and might therefore have a historical end. Moreover, he knows that the kinship he feels with Hugh extends across the watershed that divides them. This allows him to recognize “that the bookish classical reading of the last 450 years is only one among several ways of using alphabetic techniques.” What he wants his readers to see, I think, is that all techniques induce corresponding mental states. Knowing how Hugh read can provide perspective on the era of bookish reading. “A new ascetism of reading” is still possible but can no longer be presented as something natural. It must now be conscious choice in the face of alternatives and in the light of “the historical fragility of bookish text.”
Illich does not present “the two mind-sets [which] confront each other”94 in our world as an either/or. He does not wish to turn literacy into “an anti-cybernetic ideology,” and he warns against this fruitless fundamentalism. Typically, he has made it a point to learn a good deal about computers, and he suggests that “for . . . anti-computer fundamentalists a trip through computerland, and some fun with controls, is a necessary ingredient for sanity in this age” and even “a means of exorcism against the paralyzing spell the computer can cast.”95 The cybernetic dream is not induced by the computer as such but occurs only when the “cybernetic metaphor” displaces all others and leaves people without marker or compass in the weightless world of information systems. The point, therefore, is to keep awake and cleave to the watershed where one remains aware of both realities and their profound difference. “The world of cybernetic modelling, of computers as root metaphors for felt perception,” Illich says, “is dangerous and significant only as long there as there is still textual literacy in the midst of it.”96
It would be impossible here to give more than a sketch of the new reality that has made Illich so keenly aware of the fragility of his own assumptions. What I think he sees emerging around him is a world that is quite literally sense-less because sense has been washed out of the words people use. Whether people imagine that they live on a planet that they have a responsibility to “save” or think in terms of communication in which they exchange information in response to feedback signals, they adopt terms that cannot grasp embodied existence and that locate them in a realm of impalpable entities and shadowy processes that only an increasingly abstract science can even define. Between the image of the blue earth and the person who treats it as an object of veneration lie the costly, violent, and incomprehensible sciences on whose mediation the image depends. The word information can be precisely defined only by the science that reduces it to signal and noise. In ordinary speech it is as inert as a wad of cotton batting which puffs up the speaker’s discourse with an obeisance to the expert who actually knows what information is, while at the same time smothering his ability to say what he means. According to Illich, the common-garden vocabulary with which people could once express their joys and sufferings is now so infiltrated by what Nietzsche more than a hundred years ago already recognized as “the madness of general concepts” that its power to denote any sensible reality has grown pale and vitiated. “The day by day experience of a managed existence,” Illich says, “leads us all to take a world of fictitious substances for granted.” We live among “management-bred phantoms,” which convince us that our reach exceeds our grasp, put an ethical gloss on intolerable realities, and “connote self-important enlightenment, social concern and rationality without, however, denoting anything which we could ourselves taste, smell or experience.”97
The first sustained treatment of the theme of disembodiment in Illich’s work was a lecture he gave in Dallas in 1984. It appeared in extended form a year later as H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulnes. Some people in Dallas had asked Illich to contribute to a municipal debate on the desirability of creating an artificial lake in the center of the city. He responded with what he called an essay on “the historicity of stuff,” which asked whether the “recycled toilet flush” out of which the city of Dallas proposed to make its lake had lost the imaginative resonance that historically had belonged to water and become something better called merely H2O because it could no longer “mirror the water of dreams.”98 Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, in which he shows how matter is given form in the deep imagination of a given cultural epoch, Illich explored the ways in which stuff is a social creation. Archetypal waters make the invisible accessible to our senses. The waters of baptism sanctify; the waters of Lethe wash the memories from the feet of the dead and carry them to the pool of Mnemosyne where bards can retrieve them. But, beyond a certain intensity of management, Illich supposed, this connection is cut. He suggested that this was the case with the cleaning solvent which circulates through the homogeneous space of a modern city. “The twentieth century,” he concluded, “has transmogrified water into a fluid with which archetypal waters cannot be mixed.”99
H2O is a rich and rambling excursion on the mythology of water and the history of urban space. What is germane here is Illich’s account of how cultural space, or “space-as-substance,” is created. The founding of an ancient city involved an elaborate ritual which culminated in the plowing of a sacred furrow that defined its boundary. In this way space was contained and given the horizon within which it acquired its substance. Within such a discreet space people can dwell and leave their traces. “Preindustrial societies could not have existed in homogeneous space. The distinction between the outside and the inside of the body, of the city, of the circle was for them constitutive of all experience.” Modern urban space, by contrast, is homogeneous and indiscreet, an endless worldwide extension of the same, whose proper symbol, according to Illich, is the bulldozer, which from time to time reconfigures this sameness. “Only those who can recognize the nightmare of non-discreet space,” he says, “can regain the certainty of their own intimacy and thereby dwell in the presence of one another.”100
Illich returned to the theme of how boundaries generate vernacular space in what was called the Hebenshausen Declaration on Soil. This was a short manifesto-like statement Illich produced with Sigmar Groeneveld, Lee Hoinacki, and a group of friends after a meeting on agriculture at Groeneveld’s home in the village of Hebenshausen, in Germany. The declaration opposed the local encultured reality of soil to the abstractness of “the ecological discourse about planet Earth, global hunger [and] threats to life.”101 Echoing the theme of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue,102 the authors claim that virtue is embodied practice that can only exist where custom has shaped and limited a field for its application. “By virtue,” they say, “we mean that shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor ... We note that such virtue is traditionally found in labor, craft, dwelling and suffering supported not by an abstract earth, environment, or system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces.” The declaration also notes that “soil ... is remarkably absent from those things clarified by philosophy in our Western tradition” and ends by issuing “a call for a philosophy of soil.”
This call picks up a point Illich had made in “Research by People,” where he claimed that Hugh of St. Victor’s attempt to create a philosophical theology of technology died stillborn when technology was left outside the walls of the new university and philosophy took wing on the long transcendental trajectory that has finally brought it into its contemporary cul-de-sac. In a sense, Illich’s whole career can be seen as an effort to revive Hugh’s project and re-embed technology in a philosophical and theological matrix. Tools, in Illich’s sense, amplify and entrain our senses and so belong to the physical realm of soil and body above which Western philosophy has soared. In his constantly reiterated insistence on limits as the condition of meaning, and suffering as the expression of this experience, he has tried to show that these limits are inherent in embodied existence. Tools can remedy the ills of the body, as agriculture can improve soil, but only to a point. Beyond that point lie dispersion, grandiosity, and, ultimately, nemesis.
In a passage in Gender about Raymond Williams’s book Key Words, Illich comments that “each entry conveys the surprise and passion of an aging man telling us about the inconstancy of a word on which his own integrity has rested.”103 Illich has known the same experience. Responsibility was a word that carried considerable weight in his writings until at least the time of Medical Nemesis; but, in 1990, in a lecture given in Hannover, Germany, entitled “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!,” he renounced it. In this talk he argued that the word had now acquired connotations that had made it into the opposite of self-limitation. How could he be responsible, he asked, when health now implies “the smooth integration of my immune system into a socioeconomic world system” and responsibility “an interiorization of global systems into the self, in the manner of a categorical imperative.” “In a world which worships an ontology of systems,” he went on, “ethical responsibility is reduced to a legitimizing formality.”
I can imagine no complex of controls capable of saving us from the flood of poisons, radiations, goods and services which sicken humans and animals more than ever before. There is no way out of this world. I live in a manufactured reality ever further removed from creation. And I know today what that signifies, what horror threatens each of us. A few decades ago, I did not yet know it. At that time, it seemed possible that I could share responsibility for the re-making of this manufactured world. Today, I finally know what powerlessness is. “Responsibility” is now an illusion. In such a world, “being healthy” is reduced to a combination of techniques, protection of the environment, and adaptation to the consequences of techniques, all three of which are, inevitably, privileges.
As an alternative to responsibility, Illich proposed renunciation. “We no longer have a word for courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community — but that is what I am talking about. I will call it askesis.” He specified that he did not mean mortification but rather an “episte-mological askesis,” a purge of those corrupting concepts that give “fictitious substances” the semblance of a sensible existence.
Illich did not hide the fact that he was imposing a painful proscription, but he argued that only by refraining from those modes of speech and action that disguise their own powerlessness can people recover a sense of the surprising power of this moment, this place, this person. Responsibility for health is what he calls a rain dance: a way of warding off evil that at the same time domesticates it by making it appear to be in the dancer’s power. Evil, for Illich, is not manageable; and such things as nuclear weapons, genetic manipulation, and the chemical transformation of earth and atmosphere by industrial poisons are evils, not problems. “We can suffer such evil,” he says. “We can be broken by it, but we cannot make sense of it, cannot direct it.”
At the end of “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!” Illich takes up the question of “life” that occupies the last chapter of this book. Life, in Illich’s view, is the master concept of what he calls “a new stage of religiosity,”104 the primum mobile in the empyrean of fictitious substances. Two years before, he had shocked a convocation of Lutheran bishops by pronouncing a solemn curse on the use of this word as substantive. Life is used as a substantive when people speak of life on earth, or the appearance of a new life at conception. Doctors who claim responsibility for the lives of their patients, and bioethicists who asses the quality of those lives, speak in the same sense. In this radically new discourse, Illich says, life loses its anchorage in persons and becomes the ultimate resource.
Illich believes that this usage can be explained only as a corruption of Christianity. In the gospel of John, Jesus says to Martha, “I am Life.” Through the Incarnation this life becomes a person and, in consequence, transforms the meaning of personal existence forever. “This one Life is the substance of Martha’s faith and ours,” Illich says. “We hope to receive this Life as a gift, and we hope to share it. We know this Life was given to us on the Cross, and that we cannot seek it except on the via crucis. To be merely alive does not yet mean having this Life. This Life is gratuitous, beyond and above having been born and living. But, as Augustine and Luther constantly stress, it is a gift without which being alive would be as dust.”105 It is Illich’s impression that the faithful experience of Life incarnate in Christ deeply shaped the Western worldview. Only in the space vacated by this tradition is the reification of biological being as “life” even thinkable.
Life, according to Illich, is now the linchpin of a new religiosity. Evidence is not hard to find. New synthetic “spiritualities” abound, and their common feature seems to be that they enable people to worship their own reflections. Illich speaks of “a cosmos in the hands of man.”106 Life appears in such discourses as an object venerated and manipulated in one paradoxical gesture. Judaeo-Christian religion put a peculiar emphasis on creatureliness and stressed the difference and the distance of the creature from God. This stress is reflected in Illich’s emphasis on dissymmetric complementarity, the mutually constitutive difference between here and there, self and other, man and woman. Life is the sign of a monistic and homogeneous process that dissolves this difference. When British scientist James Lovelock attached the name of the ancient goddess Gaia to his hypothesis that the earth constitutes a single cybernetic system, he reflected this style of thought.107 “The revelation that one human person, Jesus, is also God” has undergone a profound inversion.108 The life that was God’s gift of himself has become a shadowy substance out of which new hypothetical gods are now conjured.
Illich told his audience in Hannover that life was a blasphemy, but then specified that he wanted to be understood “as a historian, not as a theologian.” Three years earlier he had drawn the same distinction for an audience at the McCormack Theological Seminary in Chicago. “In the Roman Catholic Church’s more recent tradition,” he said, “you imply teaching authority which derives from the hierarchy when you claim to speak as a theologian. But I will not do this.” The distinction might at first seem coy, but I believe it is critical to the understanding of Illich’s work. Illich is a Christian, but he has not attempted to claim authority for his views on that basis. Nor has he argued from concealed Christian premisses. When he says life is a blasphemy, he means by blasphemy what my dictionary calls “the act of claiming the attributes of God,” and he believes that, historically speaking, that is precisely what substantive life is: the perversion of a peculiarly Christian idea that would make no sense outside this context. You do not have to be a Christian to accept this idea that the modern West, with its vast architecture of institutions that care about people’s needs, is a perverse extension of the Church’s attempt to institutionalize the Gospel. Illich summarizes this insight in the Latin adage corruptio optimi quae est pessima — the corruption of the best is the worst, or, in other words, the depth to which we have fallen is the measure of the height to which we were called. He lives his faith in the face of a tragic recognition of “the mysterious darkness which envelops our world, the demonic night paradoxically resulting from the world’s equally mysterious vocation to glory.”
Lee Hoinacki once said to me that he thinks Illich is “doing theology in a new way.”109 Illich says simply that he speaks as a historian. I see him as an iconoclast, in the literal sense, who has tried to clear a space for living by demolishing idols rather than dictating how people should live. His friend John McKnight calls this engaging in proscription, rather than prescription.110 Believing as he does in “the extraordinary creativity of people and their ability to live in the midst of what frustrates bureaucrats, planners and observers,” Illich restricts himself to a criticism of the ideas and practices that inhibit and distort this creativity.
As a thinker, Illich is impossible to classify in conventional categories. He is a man of neither the left nor the right, as little a romantic as he is a conservative, no more an anti-modernist than he is a post-modernist. He might be called an anarchist, but only insofar as he believes the refusal of power to be the heart of the Christian Gospel, not because he subscribes to the political tenets of anarchism. The most that can be said, I think, is that he shows how revolutionary a faith Christianity is. The first millennium of Christianity, to which Illich often refers, understood the action of the Holy Spirit as both charismatic and conservative. It built and destroyed, ordained authorities and undermined them, revealed ways and showed their shortcomings. Illich’s career, with its turnings, revisions, and sudden ruptures, shows his attentiveness to this spirit. He has been both a celebrated intellectual and an anonymous pilgrim; loved the Church as the shield of a glorious tradition and spoken against its worldliness and timidity; accepted academic honors and sloughed them off; established public positions and then revised them. His thought is consistent — perhaps more consistent than he sometimes allows — but he has always tried to follow it further, valuing the journey more than the arrival. He has never submitted to his own reputation or made himself responsible for the expectations it engendered in others. And, as much as he has spoken, he has always continued to listen.
A friend, after she read Gender, put down the book, looked at me quizzically, and asked in a tone of genuine astonishment, “How does he know these things?” I probably attempted some answer, but then she answered herself: “He’s like a bird, who cocks his eye this way and that, taking everything in.” The image has stayed with me. I can remember Illich himself recalling how as a boy he often sat under the table at his grandparents’ house in Vienna, absorbing the conversation. A vivid curiosity, and an intuitive feel for what is really going on, are certainly part of Illich’s genius. He is also a keen satirist and a writer whose nice sense of both the heft and etymology of his words mixes Anglo-Saxon pith with Latinate ornamentation. But beyond this, there is a penetrating power of thought that modern English can only call insight. He has fostered this power by ascetic practice and allowed it to take root in his heart, but it is, ultimately, a gift, and one he has shared generously.
At the end of our interview, Illich said that he had set aside his misgivings about being interviewed out of “foolish trust, full-hearted trust.” This is the attitude of a friend who has never lost his capacity for surprise or the courage to put instinct above ideology and play a hunch. Its foundation is what he calls obedience.
Obedience in the biblical sense means unobstructed listening, unconditional readiness to hear, untrammeled disposition to be surprised by the Other’s word. The pagan looks at the manifestation of his gods, the Jew is open to God’s voice: Moses only saw his behind, like “a whisper that vanishes.” ... When I submit my heart, my mind, my body, I come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously with the readiness to take in the other as a radical surprise, I do something else. I bow, bend over towards the total otherness of someone. But I renounce searching for bridges between the other and me, recognizing the gulf that separates us. Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness, and able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the other and myself. All that reaches me is the other in his word, which I accept on faith. But, by the strength of this word I now can trust myself to walk on the surface without being engulfed by institutional power. You certainly remember how Peter just walked out on the waves of the Lake of Genesareth on the Word of his Lord. As soon as he doubted, he began to go under.111
Illich takes the possibility of going under seriously. He does not feign horror at the contemporary world. He is genuinely horrified, and his sadness is sometimes deep and uncomfortable. He believes that there are evils in our world that can burn out hearts, and, like the Gorgons’ glare, turn us to stone; and he is convinced that the power of these evils waxes with the fantasy that we can be insured against them. But he also knows there is a light in the world that the darkness cannot comprehend. In obedient friendship, we can let this inextinguishable light shine into each other’s lives. Embarrassed as I am by the technique of the interviewer, who wears sincerity as a disguise and walks the knife edge between spontaneity and calculation, I still believe that that light shines in these pages.