First Work — Tools for Convivality, by Ivan Illich
Reading #3 Convivial Reconstruction (This lesson in two parts)
Illich begins this chapter by referring to “symptoms.”
“The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized.”
In disease metaphors, we speak of symptoms being an outward manifestation of some deeper process that is hidden from us. Fever is a symptom of malaria. The deeper cause is a parasitic protozoa reproducing in the host animal’s blood.
What does the reader think the deeper cause of the crisis is?
How helpful is this metaphorical device? Using the distinction between cause and symptom? Can readers think of ways in which people have confused the two intentionally in order to make the symptom appear to be the disease itself?
Illich goes on to say that humankind embarked on a developmental journey based on a “hypothesis.”
In science – the metaphor that Illich is using here – a hypothesis is a supposition that has not yet been tested for its validity.
“The hypothesis on which the experiment was built,” he says, “must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.”
This is a profound critique of the developmentalism of both capitalist and state socialist ideologues, who were dragooned into the service of a very dangerous Cold War when Illich wrote this. So Illich I stepping out of the Cold War box, so to speak, and saying you two sides in this Cold War are both ignoring something very important. These machines are destroying the independence of human beings. And changing the social relations by dint of political will has not altered that.
This website features the work of anthropologist and human ecologist Alf Hornborg, who has done some very deep thinking about this issue. For those who are interested and undaunted by occasional flourishes of difficult language, his work is well worth a look.
We are reduced by our slavery to technology to “mere consumers,” says Illich.
Remember Commodificaton? Commodities require consumers. But Illich goes further than just the economic definition of consumer. He notes that we have lost the ability to produce in “primary groups.” Not only do we buy food as a commodity, food for ourselves. Food is not a luxury. We must have food to survive. We are now at the service of a vast unseen army of super-specialized experts and laborers to get something as simple as a handful of nuts or a dozen eggs or a tomato.
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Technological imprisonment is the state of near-complete dependency we all experience in a world that has been consumed with technology. Everything we use has been made by specialists. Moreover, we are dependent on the structure-as-a-whole for our “jobs,” also highly specialized, highly alienating, seemingly irrelevant.
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.
Insurgent American takes this concept very seriously. Illich was not yet facing the proximity of peak oil in the 70s that we are now. Nor had industrial urbanization yet completed the transition to imperial suburbanization inside the US. The deep alienation of the “middle class” in the US – that has served as grist for innumerable short stories, poems, novels, and films – is the emotional connection that political cadre have to make if they are to make inroads with this potentially dangerous class of people. That emotional “nausea” has to be first validated, then explained, then met with some kind of map to a remedy.
Illich then defines “conviviality”:
I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.
Present institutional purposes, which hallow industrial productivity at the expense of convivial effectiveness, are a major factor in the amorphousness and meaninglessness that plague contemporary society.
There it is. Sociologists and philosophers have described this “amorphousness and meaninglessness” as ennui. Sometimes defined as “boredom,” ennui (pronounced ‘on-WE’) is
… different from boredom in that ennui describes weariness or annoyance over a long period of time; boredom is relieved easily, while ennui is continual.
This affliction affects women even more than men, because women are doubly trapped in the alienation of pre-fabricated society as well as endangered in that society and relegated to the “protection” of the pre-fabricated home. Their choices are even more limited and “set up” than those of men.
A very famous short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, called “The Yellow Wallpaper” is considered a literary masterpiece on “middle class” ennui.
Sylvia Plath’s poem entitled “ennui” goes:
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
She would eventually turn on her modern kitchen’s oven, tape up her modern kitchen’s windows and doors, and commit suicide by turning on the gas.
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Ennui; the spiritual poverty of the “middle class.”
Illich then mentions “socialism.” He says:
The transition to socialism cannot be effected without an inversion of our present institutions and the substitution of convivial for industrial tools. At the same time, the retooling of society will remain a pious dream unless the ideals of socialist justice prevail.
Illich takes opposition to capitalism to be self-evident. What he rejects as self-evident is that industrial socialism is the way out. At the same time, he says that the “justice” aspect of the socialist ideal is as necessary to convivial reconstruction as convivial tools are to human liberation.
What does the reader believe are these “justice” ideals? Relate the response to this question to actual human bodies… no disembodied abstractions allowed.
The other interesting and important thing Illich says, “If tools are not controlled politically, they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster.”
What does that mean? What does he say later about “politicians”?
Illich describes a “new” socialism at the same time he talks about a “new” politics.
Let’s establish a working definition of politics that relates to how it is being used here: the social struggle for power, power defined as the ability to make and implement decisions.
Illich then says something very odd about actually existing politics:
Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals.
Illich says that three values establish the basis for conviviality: (1) survival, (2) justice, and (3) self-defined work. Then Illich gets to his litmus test for “convivial reconstruction:
Each of these three values imposes its own limits on tools. The conditions for survival are necessary but not sufficient to ensure justice; people can survive in prison. The conditions for the just distribution of industrial outputs are necessary, but not sufficient to promote convivial production. People can be equally enslaved by their tools. The conditions for convivial work are structural arrangements that make possible the just distribution of unprecedented power. A postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him- or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labor or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another.
Illich’s standards may sound libertarian on the surface, but they fundamentally rule out two social practices that many libertarians would defend – (1) wage labor and (2) interest-debt.
Brain teaser: How does this standard do that?
Follow-up brain teaser: What does Illich mean when he says justice that is “both distributive and participatory”? Distribute what? Participate in what?
At this point, we will editorialize why we include Illich as the first among several studies of “the New Canon,” by noting out agreement with what is written below:
…this does not mean that the transition from our present to a convivial mode of production can be accomplished without serious threats to the survival of many people. At present the relationship between people and their tools is suicidally distorted. The survival of Pakistanis depends on Canadian grain, and the survival of New Yorkers on world-wide exploitation of natural resources. The birth pangs of a convivial world society will inevitably be violently painful for hungry Indians and for helpless New Yorkers. I will later argue that the transition from the present mode of production, which is overwhelmingly industrial, toward conviviality may start suddenly (emphasis ours). But for the sake of the survival of many people it will be desirable that the transition does not happen all at once. I argue that survival in justice is possible only at the cost of those sacrifices implicit in the adoption of a convivial mode of production and the universal renunciation of unlimited progeny, affluence, and power on the part of both individuals and groups. This price cannot be extorted by some despotic Leviathan, nor elicited by social engineering. People will rediscover the value of joyful sobriety and liberating austerity only if they relearn to depend on each other rather than on energy slaves. The price for a convivial society will be paid only as the result of a political process which reflects and promotes the society-wide inversion of present industrial consciousness. This political process will find its concrete expression not in some taboo, but in a series of temporary agreements on one or the other concrete limitation of means, constantly adjusted under the pressure of conflicting insights and interests.
Illich then places great emphasis on unpredictability (he doesn’t call it that) and on decentralized improvisation (he doesn’t call it that either).
Unpredictability is not randomness. Decentralization and improvisation do not rule out macro-politics.
Why do we say that?
Illich further along says, “It would distract from the core of my argument if I were to deal with political strategies or tactics. With the possible exception of China under Mao, no present government could restructure society along convivial lines.”
Historical context note: At the time, many were very hopeful about the Chinese Revolution, because Mao’s government had placed great emphasis on the wisdom of the peasantry and the self-evident value of independence. China would eventually adopt massive industrialism and the restoration of capitalism.
Thought questions: When does a tool become a purpose unto itself? What does this question do to define the “second watershed”? How does this relate to our key concept of dogwaggery?
Quote: “Having come to demand what institutions can produce, we soon believe that we cannot do without them.”
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Demand Production – when a commodity is neither necessary nor desirable (in the sense of what is good for us), the prerequisite to selling the commodity is creating a demand for it. This is the business of advertising, as opposed to simply publicizing. If I am a lawyer, I will publicize my practice by placing it in the Yellow Pages, for example. If I develop a television ad that encourages people to take advantage of accidents to sue others, I am trying to create a demand for my services. Demand production is closely associated with ennui. The malaise of the “middle class” is characterized by profound insecurity (an unconscious acknowledgement that people not only depend on the system, but that they haven’t the slightest clue how to undo that dependency… the “sense” of insecurity is based on the reality of it). There are three important things people do when they are insecure: (1) get “insurance” (literal and figurative), (2) “whistle past the graveyard,” and (3) seek “magic enemies.”
Insurance – this is an attempt to pay for prevention and damage control. Once the generalized insecurity can be focused on “the” problem, then there is a commodity that can fix it. Listerine is insurance against bad breath. A fad diet is insurance against “being fat” (now a state transformed into a boogyman). Liability insurance will protect you against the lawyer described above.
Whistling – Entertainment is the ultimate displacement activity for fear. Whistling past a real graveyard is a way to distract oneself from fear. Compulsive sex is a way to distract with fear. Entertainment centers are distractions from fear. Status cars are distractions from fear. The unfocused fear behind the focused fear is the fear of meaninglessness, and it can manifest itself in silence, in being alone with ourselves when we can no longer seek reassurances from others playing the same game that we know what in the hell we are doing. “Killing time” is whistling in the graveyard, no matter how expensive or stimulating the distraction is.
Magic Enemies – One way to make the fear manageable is to singularize and objectify it… give it a form, so it can be walled out or ritually crushed. Watch television ads and see how many are selling something by invoking a magic enemy…
…by selling some kind of “insurance,” or by giving you a new way to “whistle.”
Now let’s turn to one of the things that is “insurance,” “whistling,” and defense against “magic enemies” all rolled into one – one of the most effective demand production campaigns in history: education.
Returning to education, make note of three points:
(1) Education is non-convivial; the alphabet is convivial. Why?
(2) Education was conceived of as a form of historical alchemy. What does that mean?
(3) Education = commodity; School = institution. Where is the dogwaggery?
What is Illich talking about when he says, “People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure.”? Another revolutionary writer, Franz Fanon wrote quite a bit about “smiling.” When we watch ads (demand production) on television and on billboards, people are always smiling, smiling, smiling. Name some ways smiling expresses something other than joy. Name some “joys” that are experienced without smiling.
QUOTE: “School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks.”
Thought exercise: Is the internet a convivial tool? Can a larger process involve conviviality at one end and non-conviviality on the other? If a shovel is convivial, then how convivial is the process by which people make shovels? What might this have to do with re-localization as a political strategy?
Illich says that we can identify the Second Watershed (remember that?) in education by when it costs more to make teaching possible than it does to teach. How might we generalize this into a criterion for other dimensions of human activity?
Explain this in your own words: “As long as Ford Motor Company can be condemned simply because it makes Ford rich, the illusion is bolstered that the same factory could make the public rich. As long as people believe that the public can profit from cars, they will not condemn Ford for making cars. The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled.”
Will a convivial society need to take measures to limit mobility?
There is a term that was used philosophically and sociologically by Karl Polanyi: embeddedness.
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Embeddedness refers to how rooted a phenomenon is in time and place. In the economic sense, a local family-run coffee shop is more embedded than a Starbucks. Embedded phenomena are more concrete and more local, disembedded phenomena are more abstract and more widespread and-or universal. There is a relationship between general-purpose money, industrial crop monoculture, the commodification of culture, alienation from one’s own body, and a psychological disenchantment with nature.
Read the section from “The issue at hand, therefore, is what tools can be controlled in the public interest” to “This new attitude toward gainful activity is well reflected in the introduction of a new term to designate it: Tripaliare.”
Relate this section to the notion of embeddedness to the role of “energy slaves.”.
Illich says:
On Baconian premises Europeans began… to save time, shrink space, augment power, multiply goods, over-throw organic norms and displace real organisms with mechanisms that stimulated them or vastly magnified some single function they performed. All these imperatives, which have become the groundwork of science as technology in our present society, seem axiomatic and absolute only because they remain unexamined.
KEY CONCEPT ALERT: Naturalized invisibility is when we are trained not to see a social reality by assimilating the belief that this socially constructed reality is “natural.” Once the process in question is understood to be “natural” (which means unavoidable, like a law of nature), there is no longer any pointing questioning why it is as it is. It “remains unexamined,” ergo, invisible. The most important aspect the dominant episteme of any system – from the point of view of those in power – is to conceal that power through naturalized invisibility.
Illich notes that prisoners were once used to generate mechanical power by the use of treadmills. What does that say to us today, that we have people who use treadmills – an instrument used to exploit prisoners for power — in gyms to offset the bad effects of the modern division of labor and the hyper-mobility of cars? Does this fit with our concept of iatrogenesis?
KEY CONCEPTS (cumulative):
(1) 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, commodification has occurred.
(2) Dogwaggery (a term invented by De Clarke). When a means becomes a more important end than the original end.
(3) Watershed (figurative definition, as used by Illich): A point in the historical process when a particular “tool” creates a quantum shift in society, like the sudden application of gravity feeding water into a terrain basin (literal watershed).
(4) Iatrogenesis (eye-uh-tro-GIN-uh-sus): Any adverse mental or physical condition induced in a patient through the effects of treatment by a physician or surgeon. For our purposes, however, we want to introduce this as a more universal idea, as another intellectual tool: Any situation where the “cure” causes more harm than the “cause”. This is a common phenomenon in modern society, but because we have been taught to think about things in discrete little boxes, and not in their relations and interactions, we tend not to see iatrogenesis. Road-building is a good example. The problem is traffic congestion. The cure is to build more roads. But with more roads, new development occurs, which is more spread out, pulling more people into the region where the congestion started, and making them more dependent on more cars. We go from traffic congestion on a small scale, to traffic congestion on a large scale.
(5) Episteme
(6) Technological imprisonment is the state of near-complete dependency we all experience in a world that has been consumed with technology. Everything we use has been made by specialists. Moreover, we are dependent on the structure-as-a-whole for our “jobs,” also highly specialized, highly alienating, seemingly irrelevant. (7) Ennui; the spiritual poverty of the “middle class.” (8)
(9) Embeddedness refers to how rooted a phenomenon is in time and place. In the economic sense, a local family-run coffee shop is more embedded than a Starbucks. Embedded phenomena are more concrete and more local, disembedded phenomena are more abstract and more widespread and-or universal. There is a relationship between general-purpose money, industrial crop monoculture, the commodification of culture, alienation from one’s own body, and a psychological disenchantment with nature.
(10) Naturalized invisibility is when we are trained not to see a social reality by assimilating the belief that this socially constructed reality is “natural.” Once the process in question is understood to be “natural” (which means unavoidable, like a law of nature), there is no longer any pointing questioning why it is as it is. It “remains unexamined,” ergo, invisible. The most important aspect the dominant episteme of any system – from the point of view of those in power – is to conceal that power through naturalized invisibility.
END OF PART 1 of 2 on the Chapter entitled “Convivial Reconstruction”