CAYLEY: Why did you write Gender?
ILLICH: I had finished Shadow Work, which contains, in my opinion, one of my crucial articles on language, the one on Nebrija, one on technology — the one on Hugh, where I make the claim that a twelfth-century thinker was the first and last one to have an alternative philosophy of technology — and one on the history of poverty and work, which establishes the concept of shadow work. I came to the conclusion that I had to go one step deeper. I had to raise the epistemological issue of modern European modes of perception. I had to get into the question of the epoch-specific apriorisms which generate not only our mental conceptions but also our sensual perceptions and the feelings in our hearts about what constitutes social reality. Social reality I define as that which we will never challenge and we will never want to wish away, such as the fact that we sit in a three-dimensional room, that Mary is a woman and you are a man, and so on.
Now this was the period during which my curious reading habits had made me discover a new branch of scientific enquiry, a field which some people pretended constituted something apart, a new view of reality. This view was based on the claim that in our society women, like black people, constitute a minority, or the claim that up to now scientific enquiry has been pursued from a white point of view, from a rich point of view, from a male point of view. In other words, I discovered feminist so-called science.
I avidly read into this material and stumbled, in German, on two little articles. One claimed that what had happened to the social role of women, historically, during the middle of the nineteenth century, had been happening during the 1960s and 1970s to the role of the underdeveloped. During the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s work and men’s work, according to this theory, had been separated, women in the house and men in the factory, women for unpaid and men for paid work, women for reproductive work, as they called it, and men for productive work. And, in a similar way during the 1960s and 1970s, the activity of the ordinary man in the North became productive work in specialized places, producing high-level incomes, while work in the poor countries became reproductive work, mostly done in or near the home by men and women who were incredibly underpaid compared with what people got in the rich countries. In this article, a German woman professor, Claudia von Werlhof — now professor of sociology in Innsbruck — spoke of the “hausfrauization” of the Third World.170 And having been engaged in the development debate I found, in this thesis, finally, a new, surprising, imaginative, and historically significant idea.
Second, I ran into an article by Barbara Duden, a colleague of von Werlhof’s. In this article, the author claimed something which I think historians by now take for granted, but which at that time constituted a surprise for me. I had not seen it stated anywhere else by historians of the nineteenth century. She said that that change which others describe as the coming of capitalism and the generalization of a capitalist mode of production she could describe as in fact a polarization of activities between reproductive women and productive men. This also generated an entirely new view of the physical, bodily existence of men and women. Men became generators, women, reproductive organisms or, precisely, wombs stuck on top of a pair of legs. I detested this crude image and the purple language in which the article was written, but it made a key point. The modern category of work, defined as something which either men or women can do, has a historical beginning.
Duden and I later on became very close friends and collaborators. But at that moment, I was surprised by this statement and began to read widely into the history of how work has been perceived. Shadow Work resulted. And in writing this polemical pamphlet, it became clear to me that the history of modern work or, more precisely, the archaeology of our mental and ideological conception of work, had not been written yet. Why? Because I observed that, no matter which pre-nineteenth-century society I looked at carefully enough to make such a judgement, no matter into which strange, so-called primitive culture I moved, a line ran through the tool kit of every one of these societies, separating tools men may grasp from tools women can grasp. A line ran through all the spaces of daily life — in the house, around the house, in the village. In some spaces at some hours you would find only women. In other spaces you would find only men. It’s possible that at another hour you would find men in spaces which otherwise were occupied by women. But there would be this demanding gender line which runs through every society; and therefore, in a traditional society, in a precapitalist society, it is impossible to speak about abstract work for which one can just hire workers without regard to whether they are men or women.
Therefore, what other people had described as the coming of capitalism really could also be described as a demise of the gender line and the creation of the completely new image of the human worker, of whom half have a bulge in the blue jeans and the other half don’t. This is the observation from which I started, crudely and brutally described.
I then got together with a few other people and went through hundreds of books in anthropology, historical anthropology, law, and history, and everywhere found my suspicion confirmed, that, until quite recently, until the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries — and in the Church a little bit earlier, in the thirteenth century — there is no talk about human beings. Customs are those of men, or those of women. Society is conceived in terms of a locally defined, dissymmetric complementarity of two fields, which designate those who are in them as that society’s men and that society’s women. In no two societies is the definition the same. I was simply so surprised, rendered so curious by what was for me at least a discovery that I spent a year reflecting on it. And since in that year I had this regents’ lectureship at Berkeley, I wrote up the lectures so that the students could prepare themselves before I arrived. The book came out of that.
CAYLEY: You claim in that book that the wage gap between men and women —
ILLICH: In modern times.
CAYLEY: — in modern times —
ILLICH: Since work has been degendered, and sexualized.
CAYLEY: — has remained the same, and even tended to increase.
ILLICH: At that time, I had to dig out the data because during the preceding fifteen years feminists had constantly complained about the gap but had not demonstrated that there was a close relationship — in all the developed countries — between the increase, during the 1960s and 1970s, and feminist activity.
CAYLEY: How do you explain that?
ILLICH: Counterproductivity, as in medicine or education.
ILLICH: Just as education has produced more stupefied people, and just as medicine has created more complaints, so feminism, as practised during those twenty years, has aggravated the wage gap. Today, I think, most people admit this. Feminism created new opportunities, new chances, for a small minority to rise, while not changing anything in the basic distance between the rich and the poor, so that by the end of a twenty-year period of feminist struggle, the distance between the typically underpaid and the typically highly paid woman was as great as that between low-paid men and high-paid men. I think that discrimination on the job ceased for the few who made it and became more intense and more conscious for those who didn’t make it.
CAYLEY: But why does this show counterproductivity rather than the stubborn resistance of the patriarchy against which feminism must continue to struggle?
ILLICH: I didn’t claim that it showed anything about patriarchy. I claimed that it showed something about sexism. I tried to distinguish between gender and sex. Gender creates in all societies two fields, two complements which are dissymmetric. In the public sphere men usually dominate women. I have absolutely no doubt of it and it disgusts me. In European, Mediterranean cultures I call this patriarchy. But this is not at all the same thing as the discrimination which can exist only where there is a claim that men and women are equal, so that every woman who finds out that she gets a bum deal, or any sociologist who finds out that women as a group get a bum deal, can speak about discrimination. Discrimination happens when somebody who officially is claimed to be an equal in fact finds out that she is not treated as a man in her place would be treated. I tried to make a clear distinction between sexism and gender, and I claimed, in that book, that science is profoundly sexist, not primarily because it is biassed — by being practised mostly by men who look from a male point of view — but primarily because it is an attempt to view reality from the point of view of the human being.
For all the other books I have written, I have been able, long before writing the book, to make a clear forty-minute statement of the argument in a lecture. I did this for Medical Nemesis in The Lancet, for Deschooling Society in The Saturday Review, and I did it for other things in The New York Review of Books, but with Gender I never succeeded in preparing a forty-minute presentation on why I wrote this book at that time, or what point I wanted to make which was relevant to the discussion of the moment. I therefore learned how to argue my point. And I argued it with people who had read my statement and questioned me on the text. In fact, for years I have found it impossible to accept invitations to lecture on what I mean by gender. I can do this in highly technical circumstances — with anthropologists, with sociologists, with economists — that is, with people who don’t know why this is important for me, with people who engage in value-free discussions and therefore don’t care what I tell them. In front of people who cared, I could discuss it, but I couldn’t put it into a lecture that would satisfy me.
CAYLEY: Why? Does that make you suspect that your thesis was cloudy? Or was it just because of the deep prejudice against you?
ILLICH: No. The category of the human being is such a profound certainty of post-Enlightenment thought that my claim that this is a recently engineered social construct is simply unacceptable. I can give my evidence, and my strongest evidence is certainly from tools. There is no way — so far at least — to falsify my statement that the tool kit is split, especially when you are as careful as I was to recognize that there are many characteristic types of exception. For example, during the last three hundred years in a certain Styrian valley, women make the second cut of the grass, using the scythe, which otherwise is strictly reserved for the men. Or, in a given valley of France, when the oldest pig is being killed, the man will select it for slaughter, while for all other pigs it is the woman who makes the selection. I was able to distinguish, with the help of Yvonne Verdier’s beautiful book on gender in a village, eighteen distinct activities during the day of pig slaughter, each assigned exclusively to men or exclusively to women.171
In order to make my point about this separation of human activities, and the gendered nature of all activity that is cultural and human, I had to distinguish carefully between the purpose of the actions which sociologists and anthropologists usually discuss, and what is observable in the action, namely, the grasp of a tool in a describable gesture. When I say bread-making or bread-serving is a female activity, I do not know exactly what I am talking about. I have taken a category which exists today and projected it into the past. When I look more closely and say that the knife is applied to the well-baked bread before it is served — by the woman, or by the man, in a given society — then I am describing the use of the hand in the grasping of tools. So these tools are gendered, but in each society differently. For instance, I know that for the Slavonic area, men cut the bread towards themselves and women cut it away from themselves, and you can’t find a single exception!
CAYLEY: I don’t think that anyone disputes your evidence. Even your critics acknowledge that gender has existed. The question, I think, is, So what?
ILLICH: This is my argument: If gender existed, in the sense in which I use the term, there were, in popular culture, no human beings. The human being is a construct of the law or of religion. The human being, then, can be sexed, of this or that kind. And I claim that most anthropologists and sociologists deal with sexed human beings and assume that human beings have always been sexed. Gender is culturally determined. It defines men as belonging to the beings who behave in one way and women as those who behave in the other. It does not really know the construct of the human being.
CAYLEY: Yes, but for feminism, this construction of the human being is liberation.
ILLICH: Yes.
CAYLEY: These gendered domains you describe are simply arbitrary limitations on human freedom to be whatever we would like to be.
ILLICH: Agreed. I have no question of that.
CAYLEY: But I’m asking what you think is lost by the replacement of gender by sex.
ILLICH: Certainly, the relative protection of women within the gender sphere of the woman. Empirically, wherever gender gets lost, if you statistically analyze a population large enough, you’ll find out that on any characteristic which is both measurable and valued, women have a bum deal. I do not try to explain this. I wrote it in 1982. I began my book by saying please look at the evidence. It is obvious that whenever gender gets lost, we move into a sexist society. And it is evident that sexism, defined as the competition of a woman for a man’s tools, was excluded, by definition, in a gendered society. For practical purposes, the only point I wanted to make was to beg people to please look at this!
It’s amazing how quickly things change. When I used the term gender in 1980, and told my publisher, Pantheon, that I wanted to write a book with that title, they told me that the only thing anyone understands as gender is the article you put in front of a noun. In certain special sciences, it means gender as distinct from species. I do know, my editor said, that some anthropologists also identify gender and sex.
Then I went back to the library — in 1980 — and looked at feminist literature. It was all a question of sexism. Sex and gender were used identically. A few people had begun to speak about the social aspects of women’s behavior as gender and their physiological differences as sex. One year after my book was published, in 1983, the two major indices for scientific literature in the United States introduced, for the first time, as a new word in the subject index gender. Today we take its use for granted, but as a completely arbitrary way of speaking about the social reflections of sex, in a certain kind of literature.
At the time the book was written, I had another deep hope. At that time, I was strongly convinced that out of the women’s scientific movement, out of the women’s studies movement, would come a radical questioning of the categories with which society is examined, and has been examined for the last twenty years, or even the last hundred years. I wanted to make my small contribution and say, “Look here, you have a chance — the first chance which I could see — for a radical questioning of the categories of economics, of sociology, and of anthropology.”
I know what it means to be treated as a Jew. The exalted feminist professors in Berkeley treated me not simply as a Jew but as a Jew who had engaged in explicitly anti-Aryan activities. They made me realize why it would have been impossible for a Jew to speak in Germany — say, in 1934 or 1935 — about racism as a category. Now, maybe, this is all funny, if you look back on it...
CAYLEY: When I asked why the loss of gender was to be regretted, you said, first of all, that it exposes women to humiliation.
ILLICH: Yes, but not the humiliation women became particularly sensitive about, that of patriarchy, a very old category. If I’m not mistaken, the humiliation which results from the loss of gender is that of discrimination.
CAYLEY: But this is only the beginning. You also suggest that with the loss of what you call the ambiguous complementarity of gender our whole way of knowing the world shifts.
ILLICH: The book which got published as Gender constitutes a small fraction of the papers I wrote at that time, for myself and a couple of friends. In those papers, I examine the break between the past, which I can explore as a historian, and the modern industrial present, in which I live and in which I can test my sociological or anthropological categories, in order to give them the appearance of scientific tools. I began then to be concerned with the same thing with which I am completely occupied today. I began to investigate the discontinuity between past and present which has resulted from the transformation of our mode of perception. In the demise of gender I found the most profound and the most radical change which has taken place during the epoch in which modern science and engineering have come into their own.
Up until that time, for instance, I was truly convinced that it was possible to speak about the human body. I still remember when a woman who has had considerable influence on me, Norma Swenson, of the Women’s Health Collective in Boston, after a lecture at Harvard asked me just one question: “Professor Illich, have you ever seen a human body?” It hit me, believe me.
For a long time I had been interested — we can come back to this, if you want — by the fact that the I, the ego, has no grammatical gender in any language in the world. There seems to be an exception in a dialect spoken in Hadhramaut. I don’t know that dialect, but it has been called to my attention.
Let it stand, it proves my rule! Suddenly, I could understand why. It was obvious that when I speak in an oral society everybody immediately knows whether it’s a man or a woman because the voice is gendered. But we aren’t born with a gendered voice. Psychologists tell us that it is the influence of our society that shapes our voices as male or female. In Madagascar, “men have to speak this way” [falsetto], and “women have to speak in a different way” [affected bass]. Yet there is no spoken language in which, when you hear it, you can’t immediately understand whether it is a man or a woman speaking.
I became increasingly convinced that the deepest change I could observe between then and now, between a prescientific, preindustrial, pre-commodity-intensive past, and our present worldview as examined by Gehlen,172 was the transition from one type of duality to another. It is quite clear that “two” can be conceived of in two different ways. When I say one, two can mean primarily, emotionally, conceptually the other, or it can mean one more of the same. Here I was helped by G. E. R. Lloyd’s great study on polarity in classical Greece.173 It seems to me that in all preliterate societies, or prealphabetic Western societies I can study, the first way of conceiving duality shaped the depths of consciousness. There is me and there is the other; there is the microcosmos and there is the macrocosmos; there is this world and the other world; here are the living and there are the dead; and, in the most profound sense, I am a man, and these others, women, are shaded for me, muted for me, other for me. There might be a search for a distant unity in which the world would disappear. But otherness, even at the height of intimacy, was what gave ultimate consistency to what we today call consciousness, to being here.
With the seventeenth century — or, as I can argue later, with certain religious ideas of the twelfth century — the human being, the self, the individual, became the model of our thinking. And then an entirely new way of seeing the other came into existence: he is an other with a black skin; the post-Cartesian inside is a special zone within a general space; people who speak English are a special group in humanity where others speak French, or German; I am a type of human being who is not constructed in the same physical way as others — you are blond, I am dark, you are a woman, I am a man. This loss of the idea of otherness involved the collapse of what as far as I can see is constitutive of all traditional language and culture and thought. The tension between dissymmetric complementarities was collapsed into an a priori abstract notion, which then finds accidental distinctions. Now I can understand why the people to whom I spoke as engaged members of a movement didn’t pick me up on this kind of reflection. It wasn’t for them!
CAYLEY: I presume the loss of gender is not absolute. But, if you’re right, to the extent that it is lost, this loss ought to be fatal to the imagination.
ILLICH: You say supposing that the loss is not absolute. The greatest difficulties I encountered when I wrote the book had to do with how to speak about what I called the rests of gender, those things we can recover in a very personal relationship of friendship, which must replace what was formerly a culturally defined relationship between men and women. We become conscious of what makes us able to survive. Without the recovery of these gender rests, we’re really locked in a double ghetto without any access to what makes poetry or imagination between the two of us possible, and at the very same time excluded from what we seek in sexed society, namely, equality as human beings. There can’t be a relationship between two human beings! It certainly has nothing to do with what Plato called friendship.
CAYLEY: You gave the lectures that were published as Gender in Berkeley. A journal called Feminist Issues later published a series of papers given at a symposium held after the lectures. What happened?
ILLICH: A group of seven senior professors of Berkeley organized a witch-hunting trial to which I was invited a week after my lectures were over. I was told from the beginning that while each of them would speak for twenty minutes, I would have ten minutes to answer the seven of them. I was accused. The papers were published, as you say, and a copy of the journal was somehow sent to me. It’s one of those journals where you may pay a certain amount and reproduce it. I said to myself, Well, this is really an opportunity to make people aware of what I have said by sending this out. So I had a thousand copies made, and a list made, but then I said, No, a gentleman doesn’t do this.
I know that this attitude will probably be interpreted as sexist, but I wanted it to show that a man doesn’t try to meddle in the gossip of women.
CAYLEY: : The women who argue against your position in Feminist Issues point to the fact that gender very frequently occurs under circumstances that are patriarchal and actively misogynistic.
ILLICH: Yes ...
CAYLEY: So there are many gendered societies where ambiguous complementarity is a bit of a euphemism for suppression, segregation, and shunning of women by men.
ILLICH: No question.
CAYLEY: And this leads to a question, I think. Is this ...?
ILLICH: Is this any better?
CAYLEY: Well, yes, all right.
ILLICH: If you carefully read my book, you’ll see that I leave this question up to women who have to experience discrimination. I ask them to make that judgement, once they have understood my distinction between patriarchy and discrimination. For instance, there is a tremendous difference in modern society between being born to poor parents and having learned in school that the reason why I have remained poor is my having failed in school — especially once you have understood that if you are born to poor parents the probability that you will fail in school is enormously higher than if you have been born to rich parents. Therefore, as an outside observer, not subject to feminist discrimination, or machista discrimination, it is my conviction that I live in a society in which the traditional Italian, Spanish, French, German, English patriarchal subjection of women has been compounded with an entirely new interiorized discrimination, which was unknown previously. And I am angry — I was then, at least, deeply angered — furious at seeing the position of modern woman as worse, as far as I could understand, than the position of women any time before. And I was also angered, though much less so, by the belief of a little bunch of women who believed that by improving their own personal status through outlawing discrimination, women would be helped.
CAYLEY: I think the problem is partly that you’re understood to be holding up the past as an ideal.
ILLICH: No, the past is a foreign country, as Lowenthal points out.174 I’m not endorsing the past. It’s past, it’s gone. Even less am I endorsing the present. I’m subject to it, I’m in it.
CAYLEY: But people see traditional society as a closed society, and I think they feel that you’re recommending a return to a closed society.
ILLICH: I’m neither a romantic, nor a Luddite, nor a utopian. I tell them, please look, try to understand how these people lived, felt, laughed, cried, moaned, shouted, fought, bit each other, stripped trousers or shirts from each other. Look at it! That’s how people lived here, and somewhere else they lived in a very different way, in hundreds of different ways. But there were certain commonalities, no matter how they lived. They had at least this one assumption that I’m discussing now, namely, gender. And then look at how we live. We don’t have the assumption about gender. We can’t go back to it. Wherever the money economy was kept at bay, gender prevailed. Exchange relations were excluded from the village or household through the existence of gender. What women could do men couldn’t do, and what men could do women couldn’t do. They depended on each other. There was a mutual dependence built in wherever gender reigned. Look at it! I’m not endorsing the way I live now. I personally find much of it terribly sad. I end my book by saying quite clearly that I have no strategy to offer. The book was not written with strategic intent. I refuse to speculate on the probabilities of a cure for the regime of sex. That’s not my task. Each one of us will have to invent, in friendship — in which I believe — his own anodyne, medicine, or ray of hope. I will not allow the shadow of some brilliant future, of something which is to come, to fall on the concepts with which I try to grasp what is and what has been.
I’m not one to dream about a fully sexed, totally degendered population of cyborgs, cybernetic organisms. Whom do I want to imitate? I don’t demand that other people follow the ascetic and the poet in meditating on death, and in the meditation find enjoyment of the present, an exquisite alive-ness, which is absent among people who close their eyes to death. So I stand looking backwards, not forwards to what will happen in the next ten years. I look backwards, to the sad loss of that perceiving duality, which is gone. I have no fantasy about it coming back.
I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered. I believe in the art of suffering, in the art of dying, in the art of living, and, so long as it is in an austere and clearsighted way, in the art of enjoyment, the art of living it up. I accept the double ghetto in which I’m stuck. I take the term double ghetto to honor Barbara Duden. The book grew out of a fight with her, which became a conversation. She coined it. We are caught in the ghetto of the economic neuter, which obligates me to recognize as barely recoverable that sense of otherness which is constitutive for people around me in a Mexican village, and, simultaneously, to renounce the relative comfort, the easygoing nonchalance, the superficiality of economic sex. The only hope for the life which I’m seeking rests upon rejection of sentimentality and openness to surprise.
CAYLEY: Gender is, in many ways, an essay in economic history, so I wonder if we could turn now to a figure who crops up increasingly in your later writings, Homo economicus.
ILLICH: Homo economicus. That would be in my yellow cards.
CAYLEY: Is he in there?
ILLICH: Certainly he’s in there, in three or four places. I always want to live detached from all things, and last year my filing case got lost in an airport. And there I realized, to my great surprise, that not because I was a poor man but because I was an old man I could say, well, I can live on without it. But here it is again!
CAYLEY: It came back ...
ILLICH: Homo economicus. I pull out the cards only symbolically, to tell you that Homo economicus is not a concept which grew in my garden. I use the term in the way in which Louis Dumont uses it. Dumont is by now an elderly sociologist who lived for a quarter of a century in India and wrote a huge study on the caste system there. He argues very strongly that our concept of the individual never penetrated the spirit or the conceptual frame of the Indian subcontinent.175 He then came back to Europe. He had been made very sensitive by his Indian experience; and, looking, if you want, as a very sophisticated Brahmin would look, he tried, through a commentary on the texts of Mandeville, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, to describe how economic man had come into existence in Europe.176 He described how society became a net of individuals who depend on each other for the satisfaction of their needs and how an image of man appeared in which he is born needy, with wants which can be satisfied only through recourse to commodities.
So I really have to send people back to read Dumont, and even more importantly, to read René Girard, whose reflections on mimetic desire cast a new light on Dumont’s work.177 Girard proves through his study of certain novels of the last century that Homo economicus comes into existence only from the middle of the nineteenth century. I begin to be a person who can desire only what I see you and others desire. Desire becomes mimetic when it’s no longer my fantasy but the imitation of the other’s expression of his need through which my need will be shaped.
CAYLEY: When does the economization of society begin?
ILLICH: Aristotle relates his shock at the fact that his fellow Athenians have begun to behave like kápeloi, which means sausage vendors on the forum, who let prices go up when there is much demand and no more fried sausage is available and let them drop when they want to sell off the last already burned remains of their sausages. He was deeply worried by the fact that decent, virtuous Athenians behaved that way. Karl Polanyi analyzes this story and points out that no author before him had taken Aristotle’s telling of it seriously.178
Polanyi made me understand, through a seminar he held on this subject for several years in the early 1940s, at Columbia, that there is nothing natural about the law of demand and supply, changing prices, that this is a highly sophisticated technique, almost as sophisticated as the idea of picking twenty-three signs for twenty-three clusters of sounds and beginning to call them an alphabet, and writing with them. These are tremendous breakthroughs. This technique was invented by Phoenicians, appeared in Athens, and then spread all around the globe.
Marketing, according to Polanyi, must not be confused with trading. Traders, who, like diplomats, arrive with products of a foreign land which they exchange at a politically fixed rate against other goods, are millennia older than merchants, who use markets to render scarce commodities that are supposedly in demand.
When people today ask me what I mean by the history of scarcity, I speak to them about what others call culture. Anthropologists take for granted the concept of culture. I remember that only twenty years ago when I used the term in German, I had to say Kultur, but in the American sense. Otherwise, Germans understood something else. And in France, I would say la culture, dans le sens Américain.
What other people call culture, I would understand as unique arrangements by which a given group limits exchange relationships to specific times and places. You may engage in these activities on Saturday, when the market is open from six in the morning till noon, or down at the brothel, or over there at the bar, but otherwise, we don’t want any of that.
For a couple of millennia after Aristotle most European cultures remained market-resistant. Markets were carefully regulated and kept in place. The story of Homo economicus, the story of commodity production — not simple commodity production, but, as Marx would say, industrial commodity production, capitalist commodity production — is the story of the last 250 years. For instance, there has been a total transformation in the perception of space. Formerly the space of one kingdom was different from the space of another kingdom. The weights and measures were different, here and there. When a good passed from one kingdom to the next, it actually changed in nature. The idea of circulation was absent. Harvey spoke about the circulation of blood, but when I carefully read him he tells me that blood circulates as Aristotle said water circulates, and then he describes distillation, not circulation! The idea that something can return to its source without changing its quality is an idea which becomes thinkable only together with vast commodity circulation around 1680. In 1650, old Harvey still defended himself against Descartes, who described the heart as a pump. “No, I don’t want to describe it that way,” said Harvey. “The blood doesn’t circulate in that way.” Thirty years later, lesidées circulent en France, traffic circulates, commodities circulate. So I’m speaking about a long history during which a certain number of our current certitudes slowly take shape, and these certainties are all requirements for living in a world where everything ultimately can be purchased for a buck. And if it can’t be purchased for a buck, it’s called a value, which is nothing else but what dollars can’t yet buy.
CAYLEY: You spoke of Polanyi and his seminar at Columbia. When did you encounter him?
ILLICH: I stumbled across Polanyi. It always seems to happen that way. One knows of a book, one has seen it quoted, one has looked it up. But one day I said, My goodness, what have I been losing by not having read this book twenty years ago? Polanyi became particularly important for me when I wrote the key chapter in Medical Nemesis, the chapter on counterproductivity. I didn’t write that book on medicine to speak about medicine, but to discuss the counterproductivity of commodity production after a certain level of intensity in supply is reached. I just used medicine as an illustration.
Polanyi became important reading for me in 1976 and 1977. I had him translated into a couple of languages where he was not yet available. Later, my work was picked up by Dr. Yoshiro Tamanoi, professor of economics at Tokyo University. He had translated Polanyi and wrote me asking if he could translate Gender, because it seemed to him a very economic book. Through my friendship with him, Polanyi became even more important for me. I have a group of four or five friends, three of them Japanese, for whom the further elaboration of Polanyi became a very major undertaking. For example, Makoto Maruyama is now at the University of Toronto doing his doctorate on alternative monies. He’s much more competent and clearsighted on this issue than I would be.
Doctor Tamanoi died. I had the honor of burying him — but that’s not the right word — presiding over the ceremonies at his cremation. I loved the man and respected him. Makoto is his successor. I would trust him to continue this conversation.
CAYLEY: What did you mean by saying Polanyi needs further elaboration?
ILLICH: Well, the same thing is true about Chayanov, as Teodor Shanin has pointed out.179 Chayanov was killed by Stalin for his thinking about the relationship between Soviet communism and the peasants. He is now becoming the great prophet and is being quickly edited in Russia, where he was proscribed for forty years after his death.
It’s funny that in this very liberal world, some of the most significant men and thinkers are, after a short period of fashion, pushed into an eclipse. Of course, you can find them in libraries, but not always so easily. Elie Halevy was the first man who really understood that Homo economicus is a totally new construct. He was a French historian of the English working class, writing at the beginning of this century. He wrote a book on radical philosophers, making a strong point that with Bentham, more or less, there is a break in European thought. This break hasn’t been explored to its depth because what is thought and discussed afterwards would formerly have been considered, under all circumstances, immoral.180 This is a book which Polanyi considered fundamental. But Elie Halevy is unavailable in France. One can find only a few copies in strange libraries of his full book on radical philosophers. In the United States, he is never read and is practically unknown. I’ll bet that, in another ten years, he will be “must” reading in departments of economics, which will have discovered in the meanwhile that they are dealing with fantasies.
CAYLEY: In your work on gender, and in your history of scarcity, you seem to be concerned with the disappearance of boundaries and of roots. Yet you yourself move easily between cultures; and when you were talking about multilingualism the other day, you disparaged the idea that people’s identities are threatened by living in overlapping cultural realities. Is there a contradiction here?
ILLICH: When I talk to you in English, I’m distinctly different in my expression than when I talk to you in French. People say that even my gesture changes, but certainly my expression, and I don’t mean just the muscles of the mouth, but the eyes. And, since words have taste and atmosphere and something which can be touched about them, the sensual reality in which I live at that moment is different in English and in French, and in German it would be different again. And when I quote in a German lecture one of my darling passages from Seneca or Abelard, for a moment I pull people away from the sensual experience of German and ask at least those who have the ability to share a bit of the power and conciseness of that Latin. When I dance the waltz, my body is a different body than when I dance the cha-cha-cha or the tango, which I don’t know how to dance.
I do believe that it is precisely rootedness which gives you ease in multilingual expression or participation in dancing intercourse with very different cultures. Only when one’s roots are cut or denied or considered as something secondary does the search for the so-called identity, for some kind of inner fitting of the individual upon itself, become an important fantasy.
CAYLEY: How can this mobility of which you speak be distinguished from the decentered personality which one finds in postmodern thought?
ILLICH: Roots ... knowing that soil exists only insofar as you are within a horizon and a true horizon always roots you in soil even if it’s the soil of the desert through which you walk.
CAYLEY: So mobility, which is not rootlessness, depends on the substantial existence of things within a horizon, which enables us to belong to them, and not on some fantasy core to our personalities, which you regard as a Romantic illusion.
ILLICH: When the old Estruscans or Greeks wanted to found a city, they drew a furrow the way the clock runs around an envisioned space. And that furrow became symbolic of the meeting place of heaven and earth, outside and inside, horizon and soil. Always, each one of these meetings was conceived as a marriage, a sacred marriage. Rootedness has something to do with the full awareness that we bear asymmetric complementarity within us, that we are one insofar as we are the meeting of two that fit but aren’t mirror images.
CAYLEY: Identity grows stronger as the world becomes more spectral, in a sense.
ILLICH: Identity becomes a necessary refuge for those who live in a spectral world. That’s true. But I’m not speaking of identity. I’m speaking of rooted-ness, of awareness of lying in the hands of another, of contingency, and of being myself because I’m constantly being created and sustained. That’s the mystery. But if’s very difficult to speak about these things which seem to have been obvious and unquestioned during a thousand years of Western tradition.