(Installment 1)
First Work — Tools for Convivality, by Ivan Illich
Reading available online.
Reading #1 (Introduction)
Author Biography
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna in 1926. He came to the United States in 1951, where he served as assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rican parish in New York City. From 1956 to 1960, he was assigned as vice-rector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. He was a co-founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He directed multiple research seminars on “institutional Alternatives in a Technological Society,” with special focus on Latin America.
Tools for Conviviality was edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, a philosopher who edited World Perspectives, Religious Perspectives, Credo Perspectives, and Perspectives in Humanism, as well as “The Science of Culture” series. She wrote and lectured on the relationship of knowledge to the nature and meaning of humanity and existence. She authored The Reality of the Devil: Evil in Man, published by Harper and Row.
Foreword on the Reading:
As part of the commitment of Insurgent American not to gloss over or apologize for phallocentric gendered language, we will point out at the outset that both Anshen and Illich routinely used (the sometimes capitalized) “Man” as linguistic shorthand for the species Homo sapiens, in the same way we might use the term “humanity.” It is inevitable that, even though this was the convention of the day when Tools for Conviviality was written, this language both reflected and reproduced a male-centric viewpoint. Later readings, including directly feminist works, will sometimes employ the same convention. We present no excuse for this, but feel it is necessary to acknowledge it. There remain, nonetheless, especially in the discussion of technology and institutions, important insights and critical questions raised in Tools for Conviviality.
Illich is part of an intellectual tradition that emerged in the post-WWII 20th Century that recognized the inescapable importance of the critiques of capitalism raised by secular traditions like Marxism, and the continuing role of religion and spirituality in people’s lives as a counterweight to the sense of alienation and meaninglessness that seemed to pervade modern life. This tradition has attempted to face and critique the failures of state-socialism that was one attempt to give these anti-capitalist critiques a political expression, and at the same time preserve the most effective methods of inquiry that came out of the political activity of the left. Some would come to call this “liberation theology,” the attempt to synthesize the best aspects of religion and historical materialism. Illich was part of a collective effort to re-shape the philosophical assumptions of the coming epoch, in order to re-found the politics of liberation.
Illich and others discovered that the artificial boundaries between “academic disciplines” were impediments to this project, and his work is an early and effective application of trans-disciplinary thinking that subverted the philosophical sub-division of reality, and hyper-specialized the labor of scholarship generally. Insurgent American and Intellectual Hardball are both projects with the overthrow of the intellectual division of labor as one of our lodestars; so we find Illich’s early critique of industrialism prefigures important works we will study later on by at least two decades, especially Alf Hornborg’s description of the “fetishization of the machine.”
Readers, do not despair. All this will become clearer, and you will find that by the time you encounter many of these unfamiliar notions, they will have become familiar without you even realizing it. That is the purpose of this long and patient journey at IH. By taking these readings a bite at a time, we intend to make this intellectual development project a savory and enjoyable process of discovery.
THE READING - Introduction
1) Introduction
In the introduction, Illich plants some very provocative assertions in his first paragraph. These assertions raise a few questions about definitions. What is a monopoly? What does he mean when he says “monopoly of the industrial mode of production”? What is mode of production? And why does he describe the epoch as one of “packaging” and “schooling”?
What is a monopoly?
The dictionary defines this use of the word as “exclusive control of anything.”
What does he mean when he says “monopoly of the industrial mode of production”?
So he is saying that the “industrial mode of production” has acquired “exclusive control” (of what? we might ask). Since the opening paragraph contains these assertions, we might hope that this question will be answered. In reading a piece like this, when we see this teasing device used, the author is telling us to be alert, to hold that question. So now we are looking actively in the following text for the answer to the implicit question: Of what has this “mode” gained exclusive control?
It’s an odd question, because we think of people, or conscious agents, exercising control. He I suggesting that something less personal, less local, more abstract, has gained “exclusive control.” Something called a “mode of production.”
What is mode of production?
This is actually a term popularized by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels in their attempt to analyze the development of capitalism in England. There is a formula for remembering this.
Instruments plus Relations equal Mode.
Marxian analysis studies the process of commodity production: that is, the production of things-for-sale. The production process is not designed by its initiators to use the products, but to use the products to turn money into more-money — making the product a commodity. Marxian analysis further seeks to understand the development of this process, how it changes, and describes that process of change as “history,” here a processand not a mere collection of facts from the past.
They needed to break that process down to see what gave it its dynamism, its refusal to stand still. So they looked at two aspects of production: (1) the instruments of production (productive technology), and (2) the relations of production (the relationships between people in the production process, with an emphasis on questions of power and obedience). The living, shifting combination of instruments of production with relations of production (which interact with each other) they named “mode of production.”
So when you see this term again in anything written on sociology, economics, politics, etc., this is where it comes from, and what it means.
In the context of this book, we can now see that Illich declares in his very opening sentences that the relations-and-instruments (mode) of production has come to exercise “exclusive control” over… something.
And why does he describe the epoch as one of “packaging” and “schooling”?
Again, he is teasing the reader by provoking the reader with an unfamiliar claim. We are not the epoch of rocketry and computers and fast cars and war. We re the epoch of “packaging” and “schooling.” We are part of an epoch of gerunds (verbs used like nouns).
This is telling the reader to stay alert. He is gong to have more to say about these gerunds, about how an action (verb) can become to behave like a conscious agent, a thing (noun). Generally, our mode of production (thing) is exercising (verb) “exclusive control” over… something. More concretely, this control is being accomplished by “packaging” and “schooling.”
He talks about schooling first. Try and read over the three-part outline he presents to critique modern public education until you can roughly paraphrase them by memory. Then set them aside until we come back to this in later chapters.
Further along, Illich says: “Our analysis of schooling has led us to recognize the mass production of education as a paradigm for other industrial enterprises, each producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility, and each defining its output as a basic necessity.”
Three terms: service commodity, public utility, output.
How do these terms differ from our notion of “education”? Why do we call it “education” and not “learning”? How does this language reflect our attitudes about who are the subjects and who are the objects?
In our earlier discussion of the commodity, we noted that it is a thing produced not for its direct value (use), but for an instrumental value (accumulating more money). He seems to be saying that we are manufacturing something, and that our kids who go to school are just a step in the process of that manufacture. What?
Public utilities are what? Infrastructure, for which the state gathers taxes to cover costs, perhaps? Like electricity? Like sewage systems. Like roads?
Does the term “output” seem jarring when we talk about schoolchildren?
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Commodificaton. The transformation of anything into a commodity. This can refer to the production and sale of a fire brick, to selling tickets to see a natural cavern. Once it is turned into a thing-for-sale, commodificationhas occurred.
Illich goes on to say that “the unwanted secondary results well known from the overproduction of goods…”
Short explanation: Another Marxian concept. Driven by competition between enterprises, and constantly eroded by a tendency of the rate of profit to fall (all other things being equal), capitalist production (competitive commodity production) has a cyclic tendency to accelerate production until the various brakes on consumption (exploitation of consumers, diving currency values, etc.) kick in; whereupon, the stocks of commodities suddenly mount up in the warehouses, so to speak. Capitalist economists call it “overcapacity.” Marxian economists call it a “crisis of overproduction.” It happens because the motive for production is not matched to the end-use of the commodity. A hairbrush factory produces items that end-users employ to brush their hair. The factory owner, on the other hand, relates to the hairbrushes as a means to another end… turning a profit on his-or-her investment.
The production-tail begins wagging the consumer-dog.
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Dogwaggery (a term invented by De Clarke). When a means becomes a more important end than the original end. Good example: Local communities who want jobs invite prisons to be constructed. The prisons are not being constructed because they are “needed,” except from the point of view of frightened people and the politicians who frighten them. The prison is being constructed to provide jobs. The tail (jobs) is wagging the dog (“need” for lockups).
Illich compares the production of education with this economic dogwaggery; only here he is pointing to an analogous but not identical form of dogwaggery. He is saying that the industrial “paradigm” (a 50-cent work meaning social model), applied to learning, creates an institutional dogwaggery. We don’t care if the students (output) can think. We are training them to conform and perform. And in the process, the institution (the school) begins to think of itself as the end, and the students as the means.
If the reader is also not averse to writing a bit, here is a suggestion. In your own words, describe what you think Illich means by the three “shuns”: social polariza-shun, splintering specializa-shun, and cancerous accelera-shun.
In Illich reference to “ideologies,” we need to understand what he means. He is referring to a system of ideas, specifically Marxist ideas, that critique “capitalist control” over industrial production. He notes, however, that this “ideology” does not critique the “industrial mode of production.”
What do you think is the difference? There are no written assignment here. It’s just a question about which to think for a moment. If we haven’t grasped the Aha!here , the rest of this book might seem… confusing.
(NOTE: In expression from this site, the term “ideology” will be used in the more pejorative sense, as Marx did, to describe ideas that “simultaneously conceal and reproduce power.”)
How does Illich define “convivial society”?
What does “eutrapelia” mean, in your own words?
Can you think of an example of “joy in austerity”?