Deschooling the Edublogosphere?

This post from NZ edublogger Leigh Blackall - which I picked up via Stephen Downes - hails (or at least hopes for) a comeback for Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society', which reminded me that I should blog the video of my Temporary School of Thought talk.

Click To Play

Many thanks to Vinay for filming that! He also blogged an audio recording of the event, which got picked up in a thoughtful post from Andrew J Cernaglia.

In a different key, I've just uploaded an article I wrote last year about Illich's influence on and warnings about the development of personal computing and the internet:

Carl Mitcham laughed when I told him I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. Now in his mid-sixties, Mitcham is a philosopher of technology, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and former director of the Science-Technology-Society Programme at Penn State. He was also, from the late 1980s, a member of Illich's circle of friends and collaborators, the travelling circus which surrounded him from the closure of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca in 1976, until his death in 2002.

What made Mitcham laugh was his recollection of Illich telling him, in exasperation, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought of it was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror.

The story of Illich's influence on the internet and the reasons for his mistrust of it both deserve attention. Together, they present something like a paradox: how did a thinker whose vision of 'learning webs', 'educational networks' and 'convivial tools' inspired key figures in the development of personal computing come, by the late 1990s, to believe in 'the necessity of defending... our senses... against the insistent encroachments of multimedia from cyberspace'?

(Continued)

I just came across another blog that's picked up on Charlie Leadbeater's article on Illich and the DIY State this week, so it does feel like there's an appetite for these ideas at the moment. And if you were looking for more pieces of evidence, I guess you could say that us raising a second round of funding for School of Everything was also a good sign!

Fax Machines and the Invention of the Wheel

It's great to see Tim posting again on I Will Rush No More, one of my favourite blogs. For me, there's a definite connection between his practise of slowing down and the tradition of otium that I've been writing about. What I admire is Tim's talent for placing his reflections in medias res, reporting a conversation with a neighbour while clearing snow off his drive, or over breakfast with a friend:

I ask: "When do you think it all changed, all this speeding up stuff?"

He says: "Easy; it changed the day fax machines became available for the home-office. Then you never got away from it and it also created an expectation of urgency where you had to deal with it right away and get back to the sender."

In a comment on Tim's post, John Xenakis writes:

The fax machine? Naah. It began with the Xerox machine. No, I mean the Univac machine. Wait, no, I mean the telephone. The telegraph. The Pony Express. The carrier pigeon. The tom-tom.

Oh hell, it began when they invented the wheel.

I suppose John has a point, in that it can be worth pushing further back, recognising the extent to which the latest and most obvious source of aggravation may be less new than it seems. Often, it turns out to be an intensification of a pre-existing tendency (as I've been arguing about managerialism in the university).

One direction this can lead is to the sort of radical critique of "civilization" offered by Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan or Ran Prieur. It was Tim who first put me on to Ran's writings, while one of Ran's posts yesterday gives a nice example of how counterproductive rushing can be. He's quoting an email someone sent him about Alan G. Carter's The Programmers Stone:

"Alan Garter [sic] tried to find a reason why some programmers are 10-25 times more productive than others. He stumbled across the answer, and made a team of super-programmers. Then the rest of the organization turned on his team! His theory is that people are literally addicted to stress. Stress releases dopamine in the brain, which gives a the stressee a good buzz. When two people accustomed to different levels of stress meet, they often don't like each other because one is getting overly stressed and the other isn't getting their dopamine hit. Stress also shuts off what he calls juxtapositional thinking, a holistic, comparative mode of thinking."

Basically there are two kinds of thinking and you need both, but under stress you're limited to thinking that is narrowly focused, methodical, and not at all intuitive. And to have a productive/unstressed programming team, you first need an unstressed organization around them. Clearly this goes way beyond programming. This whole civilization is driven by stress, and has been for thousands of years.

(This reminds me, in passing, of a post a while back from JP Rangaswami, a friend of School of Everything, about the different types of laziness.)

But back to John's comment. If we have to trace the tendency to futile acceleration back from the fax machine, via the telegraph, all the way to the invention of the wheel, doesn't this just lead to paralysis? How on earth can you and me escape? ("History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.")

In Illich's thinking, I can find two possible ways out from this paralysis. The first is the idea of thresholds. Particularly in his earlier work, Illich stresses the idea that technologies have a threshold beyond which they become counterproductive. So rather than the vertiginous regression that leads back from the fax machine to the wheel, we could seek to discern the point at which this happened. That's more or less what Tim and his friend seem to be doing in their conversation - though we might want to push the threshold further back.

Dean Bavington, who I met in Cuernavaca, gave an outstanding presentation on the technological threshold in the Newfoundland cod fishery. He illustrated this by passing around the audience a 'cod jigger', the fearsome piece of equipment which he believes represents the crossing of that particular threshold. Prior to the introduction of the jigger, cod could only be caught if they were hungry enough to take the bait; from that point on, fishing increasingly became the indiscriminate scooping up of biomass, until catastrophic collapse led to the closure of the fishery in 1992.

The second possible way out is by shifting attention from the technology itself to the qualities of relationships. What kinds of relationship does a particular technology tend to foster among those who use it and those around them? Does it tend to encourage instrumental attitudes, seeing other people or things as a resource, a means to an end or a source of exchange value? Does it decrease the amount of time and space the user has for those around them?

If we pay attention to questions like these, we may choose to go on using a particular technology, despite its general tendencies, because we see the possibility - with care - of using it in other ways. Or, as I suggested the other day, we may choose askesis - voluntary renunciation, temporary or permanent, of a particular technology, habit, or whatever - so as to allow room for otium, for time spent on the things that matter to us and with the people who matter to us.

This is where I see Anthony's thinking about gentleness leading - and it takes us back to where we are, clearing snow or talking over breakfast.

Why the only true schooling is a vacation (or "What I didn't do in my holidays")

It has been a week already since I got back from Mexico. I returned with all kinds of things to post about and no great desire to get posting.

Among the pleasures of the Illich colloquium, one was the almost total withdrawal from electronic communication. My reluctance to begin reporting back is partly a reluctance to complete my reintegration to the technological matrix, and partly a sense that the experiences and conversations at Cuernavaca took place not only in a different time zone, but in a different sort of time. Whilst there, they made perfect sense, but a process of careful and unrushed translation is needed, or they are in danger of becoming nonsense. (Leastways, that's my excuse for having been so inarticulate when people asked me how my trip went...)

The pleasure of withdrawing from technology would have been no surprise to Illich. One of the consistent strands in his work is a call to askesis, the discipline of freely chosen renunciation. The purpose of such renunciation is not self-punishment, nor does it imply a judgement on those who don't choose to join us in renouncing a particular habit, activity or technology. Rather, it is a way of making room for the pleasures of otium (of which, more in a moment).

All this, though, is foreign to us. When 'asceticism' is referred to today, it generally signifies a (probably perverse) religious practice. It suggests masochism - or, at least, that hatred of the body which the secular often regard as an essential feature of the religious. It is worth highlighting, then, that in Illich's writing, this aspect of asceticism is not simply downplayed, but explicitly countered. In a 1989 proposal for a five year course aimed at recovering 'the perceptions of self and other which led to the formation of ascetical disciplines,' he writes:

I will place the body rather than the mind at the center of my lectures, not because I can distinguish the two, but because I need a term, the term "body" to engage the student's interest in the traditional habits that cultivate personal centers which they might never have adverted to, such as the heart, the eyes, the limbs, the stomach, the flesh, the ears and the spirit.

'Ascetical habits' once stood in balance with 'critical habits' in the western tradition of learning, but were marginalised from 'the foundation of the University in the late Middle Ages'. Though he doesn't spell it out, I suspect Illich saw a direct connection between this and the disembodiment of knowledge characteristic of modern science. (An idea which deserves fleshing out in a post of its own.)

For now, back to the pleasures of otium, for which askesis makes room. In Latin, otium is leisure, peace and quiet, freedom from responsibility: something looked forward to in retirement or time off from worldly duties. It is the term used by Augustine to describe his calling to a life of study and contemplation, and it characterises the atmosphere required for learning in the monastic tradition. The connection is ancient: the Greek for otium is schole, from which we get 'school'. (And according to Strong's Greek Dictionary, schole is 'a vacation from physical work' and scholazo is 'to take a holiday', so the truest form of schooling really is a vacation!)

The opposite of otium is negotium, literally nec-otium, 'no-leisure'. This is business, occupation or employment - but also pains, trouble and difficulty. Such affairs may not be ultimately escapable. (For Augustine, the calling to otium is in tension with the negotium of ecclesiastical responsibilities.) Yet the value of escape, temporary or permanent, is not in doubt - and it is seen as essential for the pursuit of learning.

All this is of interest to those of us who enjoy the dance of words and ideas to the rhythm of history. The more practically minded may find it 'otiose' in the modern sense: idle, useless and a waste of time. (Mind you, those changed connotations do offer a striking measure of how values have shifted.) Yet there may be meat here for those of us who would negotiate the world of education today.

Both personally and on behalf of School of Everything, I am keen to take part in conversations about the future of the university and of higher learning in general. I share the opinion of those who see in the current crisis of Higher Education, not merely a need to defend the older professional model against managerialism (or to mourn its passing), but the hopeful possibility of new, marginal spaces in which we can explore other ways of organising learning. So I was intrigued, earlier this year, when I heard about the EduFactory project to explore the 'Conflicts and transformations of the university'.

Yet, not for the first time, I found myself disappointed by the conversation that ensued (through the medium of an unfortunately unarchived email list). A great volume of words was produced, theoretically dense, often leading to bad-tempered exchanges, yet suggesting also a great deal of intelligence and good intentions. It was perplexing. My friend Anthony, who has the advantage over me of being a certified academic, lost patience, told the list what he thought and went elsewhere. Essentially, he told them they were suffering from collective verbal diaorrhea, and he wasn't wrong, but what I hadn't located until I sat down to write this was the source of their incontinence.

Bearing in mind the concepts of otium and negotium, the problem may be seen from the name of the project, or from the prospectus for its second round (which began last month):

The first round of discussion on the edu-factory list showed that, despite the many differences between universities and countries, it is possible to identify a global trend and common experiences in the world of the university. These stem from the pervasiveness of the market and the processes of corporatisation that universities in many parts of the world are undergoing. But they also involve the struggles and movements that have contested academic borders as well as wider power structures, claiming the free circulation of knowledge and practicing alternative forms of knowledge production.

For the radicals of the edu-factory list, just as much as their supposed enemies, the university is conceived of as a factory for 'knowledge production'. No wonder they are so industrious in the manufacture of neologisms, or such Stakhanovites in their output of emails!

Government ministers often see universities (or, to be more precise, Oxford and Cambridge) as feudal anachronisms, holding out against good, rational, business management. The truth is stranger. The very roots of the modern university, as early as the 13th century, are in the turn away from otium as the proper atmosphere for study, towards worldy negotium. So the contemporary crisis is rather more like that of an old family business, run for generations on gentlemanly terms, which finds itself suddenly under new ownership and having its assets stripped.

After going on for eight centuries, most inhabitants of the university can barely imagine it as anything other than a factory for the production of knowledge. Yet the grounds for such imagination are just what study-as-otium can offer. Illich, again:

I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competence that makes it feasible to inquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.

And, in another essay, 'The Cultivation of Conspiracy':

Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

Is there any hope for learning as a quest, rather than a production line? For these strange concepts of askesis and otium? 'The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century,' Illich wrote, 'is something profoundly different from any previously known.'

I find hope in the company of those I met in Cuernavaca, but also in a series of encounters since I returned with some of the smartest, most technologically adept people I know. One is giving up sending email from his thirtieth birthday. Another will spend ten days over Christmas and New Year in a silent retreat. The third claimed to have spent the past few months 'shitting myself into a twelve inch screen' and to want reminding that she has a body. The possibilities are there.

Anyway, the great thing about otium is that you don't have to wait for the fulfilment of a grand project to enjoy it. You can start by switching off your computer, turning off your phone, stretching your work-cramped body and deciding to dedicate the weekend ahead to meditative idleness - which is just what I plan to do now.

Adios!

In less than twelve hours time, I will be on my way to Mexico! I don't know how much internet access I'll have - or want to have - over the next week. But I'm sure I'll report back on the gathering in Cuernavaca before long.

To be AND not to be

As words must be learned by listening and by painful attempts at imitation of a native speaker, so silences must be acquired through a delicate openness to them. Silence has its pauses and hesitations, its rhythms and expressions and inflections; its durations and pitches, and times to be and not to be.

The last phrase of that passage, from Illich's reflection on 'The Eloquence of Silence', makes me sit bolt upright whenever I reach it. Let me try to explain.

'To be, or not to be?' That is the question with which we are familiar. The figure of Hamlet, like that of his creator, stands at the back of what (in the long sense) is called modern English literature. 'Modernity' is a slippery concept, but there is a certain peculiar way of thinking about the world which became dominant among the powerful and 'forward-thinking' in western Europe from the 17th century onwards.

One of the peculiarities of this way of thinking is a tendency to insist on 'either/or' answers. (Anthony - who would probably steer me away from historical narrative here - talks about 'the elimination of uncertainty' as a key characteristic of the 'dynamics of enclosure' which he critiques.) This 'either/or' tendency is itself a characteristic of a desire for once-and-for-all solutions.

One of the things which is lost, as this way of thinking becomes dominant, is the sense of timeliness. The assumption that different, seemingly opposite, things may be right at different moments gives way, for example, to the attempt to identify timeless, universal Rights. (Paradoxically, the superiority of these tends to be bound up with the non-timeless assumption that the present is necessarily superior in wisdom to the past. This, however, is a very different kind of time to that experienced by those immersed in the sense of timeliness.)

Much of this is sensed in Shakespeare, anticipated and handled with careful ambiguity. (Hamlet himself observes that 'the times are out of joint'.) Harold Bloom made the bold claim that Shakespeare 'invented the human as we know it'. In a different key, it might be said that Hamlet seems the prototype of the modern individual, the subject who feels obliged to contain a universe within his self - to reach 'either/or' answers.

So, when Illich ends his list of the properties of silence with its 'times to be and not to be', I hear an echo arcing back over the centuries, or outwards from those centres of power where Hamlet-like leaders strut and fret, to the vernacular world in which Illich was at home. In Shakespeare's England, this world was still close enough at hand to feed in and out of his writing - soon afterwards, the gap between the vernacular understandings of reality and those common among the intellectual, political and literary elites would extend to a point where, finally, high culture could rediscover 'the folk' as (more often than not) an exotic object of fascination and condescension.

Illich - where to start?

Since I started this blog, I've name-checked Ivan Illich fairly regularly. His writing style takes a little getting used to, but his books and the various uncollected essays scattered across the web are pretty much all worth tracking down.

One question I get asked a lot is where someone who's new to his work should start. The long answer is, it depends on where you're coming from and what it is that most troubles you about the world in which we find ourselves - whether it is education or energy, health or work. Those looking for policy recipes were dismayed by his increasing withdrawal from that game, and mistake this for despair - but I find later texts, such as 'The Cultivation of Conspiracy', to be among the most genuinely (unillusionedly) hopeful responses to our times.

That's the long answer! The short answer is to try this little film, a reflection on 'Deschooling Society', which I discovered via Bricoleuse.

A Book I'm Looking Forward To

From Jim Johnson's (Notes On) Politics, Theory & Photography comes exciting news - a new book from John Berger, due out in June. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

More from the Verso website:

From Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and 7/7, to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and memories that occur in the course of political resistance to empire and colonialism.

These sensuous reflections reveal the political at the core of human existence, from the relentlessness of daily life in the West Bank, to the potential force of desire, to the unflinching gaze of Pasolini's political film. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on what political resistance means today, by one of the most compelling radical voices of our age.

I did think to write at greater length about Berger himself and why his work matters so much to me, but I had trouble distilling this into a single blog post. At which point, I got the idea of creating a separate site (organised more appropriately to the task) on which to publish my notes on Berger, Garner and Illich - and the connections and resonances between their work. Because they are generally shelved in different sections of the bookshop, these connections have seldom been made, but I have found them deeply helpful in making sense of the world we're in.

So one of the reasons for the relatively neglected state of this blog is that I have started work on that site, under the title 'Redrawing the Maps'. Given the number of unfinished grand projects gathering dust in different corners of my life, I'm keeping this simple. As soon as I've pulled together enough material to be of use or interest to anyone - hopefully within the next few weeks - I'll make it public, while continuing to add to it as and when I get the chance.

A Fine Piece of Mischief

There's a nice story in today's Guardian Society section about an unusual piece of corporate generosity. A dozen tiny grassroots campaign groups got a surprise earlier this year, when letters arrived from the cosmetics chain Lush, swiftly followed by cheques for £1000. Among them was the campaign against the widening of the M1 motorway run by my friend Julie White.

These are groups that generally run on a mixture of sweat and imagination, so the cash should come in handy. As impressive (to me) as the gifts is the logic which led Lush CEO Mark Constantine and campaigner Rebecca Lush (no relation!) to them:

"My son and one of the buyers went out to Thailand after the tsunami and it was pretty horrific," he explains. "They saw all the wasted money, all the schools bought for children that weren't alive, boats that will never sail, houses for people that don't exist, a general waste of all the money that everyone chucked in. And that's why we're so specific, that's why I asked Rebecca to get the activists on board. We could give a hundred grand to the Prince's Trust (who we like very much) or we could give that in one grand lots to people stopping climate change. Frankly, that sounds more fun."

The waste of money by large charities Constantine describes sounds very much like the phenomenon Ivan Illich called 'paradoxical counterproductivity' - the tendency of modern institutions to produce the opposite of their stated purpose, so that (for example) the education system becomes an obstacle to learning. He associated this with a tendency for activities which begin as a means to an end to end up being performed for their own sake.

For Illich, examples of such counterproductivity are not simply unfortunate accidents, but a consequence of the very structures by which we organise the institutional delivery of care. It is not that learning cannot take place within our education systems, but that it does so in spite of them - where people manage to open a space in which the hold of institutions is loosened, allowing the possibility of convivial relationships, based on invitation and free response.

What is startling about Illich is that, unlike most critics of contemporary capitalism, he doesn't focus on the obvious targets - multinational corporations, the military-industrial complex. His attacks on the caring professions, the institutions of the social democratic state, even the concept of "responsibility", have seemed blasphemous to many. (In fact, it is precisely the "sacredness" of his targets which he sees as making them so dangerous!) Others, on the left, portray him as an unworldly intellectual whose ideas were hijacked by Thatcherites - a well-meaning fool.

Part of the difficulty is (and I realise I may lose anyone who's still following this here!) that, while his mode of expression was largely secular, Illich's thought is at bottom deeply theological - it is 'foolishness to the Greeks'! It is an invitation to turn your view of the world upside down, which is a frightening prospect. Later texts such as 'Health as one's own responsibility - no, thank you!' make stark reading - and, even among his admirers, there are those who see him as descending into backward-looking pessimism. This is a convenient misreading, which allows the reader to sidestep the full implications of his work. But to face its force, it may help to notice the playful smile with which it was delivered, the joyful foolishness which is the other side of Illich's invitation.


There is a sense of that, too, in Mark Constantine's explanation of why he chooses to donate to such small, grassroots groups:

"If you're going to give money away you might as well give it to someone who's going to do something stupid with it." His favourites among the groups are Sardine Man, who travels the country highlighting congestion problems, or the Guerilla Gardeners, who plant flowers on ugly traffic islands in the dead of the night. In that spirit he's also created the Charity Pot, a hand lotion from which all the proceeds, save the VAT, will be going to more of these small grassroots groups.

"I hate cars, I really hate them, but I'd been giving up the ghost, until Rebecca came along and we started all this up," says Constantine. "It's really rekindled my bloodymindedness. When you think about it, you think how much mischief you can do with a thousand here, a thousand there, it's great. If we get a million out of the Charity Pot, we could create absolute chaos."

His face lights up and he starts to laugh. "They won't be able to get a digger to move across the whole of Britain!"

Illich once calculated that - once you take into account all the hours spent working to pay for a car, petrol, insurance and taxes to build roads - drivers manage an average speed of around four miles per hour. I can't help feeling that, were he still around, he'd approve of Mark Constantine's mischief-making!


More Illich links:

A useful introduction to Illich's thought
A selection of online texts
Reflections from Illich's friends, following his death in December, 2002
Thinking after Illich - English version of a site created by some of his friends and collaborators

Mud Maps and Long Breakfasts

Around this time last year I had the good luck to share the back seat of a car to and from a conference with a young academic called Anthony McCann. I had already read one of his articles which suggested both that he was alarmingly clever and that we had many interests in common, and so that weekend led to a friendship which grew over the following months. On Monday mornings we would meet at 8.15 at my favourite cafe and it was not unusual for us still to be there, several coffees down, as the lunchtime rush began.

That series of drawn out breakfasts offered the most sustained period of intellectual guidance I had known since leaving Oxford. Six years on, I was more committed to the ground we covered and (with no disrespect to my old tutors) had found a teacher better suited to my own ways of thinking. (Among other things, it had the effect of allaying my insecurity about never quite making it back to academic study, despite the good intentions and aborted Masters courses of my mid-twenties.)

Sadly for me, though not for him, Anthony moved on to Derry last summer, where he now lectures at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster. Around the same time, my own life became busier, and our friendship has lain fallow of late. But I was brought back tonight to one of the maxims to which he would return regularly in our conversations. "The more the words matter, the less they matter."

It seems a paradoxical saying for a pair who could talk four hours flat and barely stop for breath. (On one memorable occasion, our conversation was overheard by Sam West, who introduced himself afterwards and expressed an interest in hearing more of my ideas - an interest which sadly came to nothing...) But besides reminding me that I'm too good at hiding in words, Anthony's point was that the more you insist on the letter of what you or anyone else is saying, the less likely it is that you are paying attention to or being heard by those you are with.

Ivan Illich gets at a similar truth in his essay, 'The Eloquence of Silence'. (I quoted this at greater length on Anthony's Crafting Gentleness blog last summer.) He is reflecting on the experience of providing language training to priests, teachers and social workers:

It is... not so much the other man's words as his silences which we have to learn in order to understand him...

The man who tries to buy the language like a suit, the man who tries to conquer the language through grammar so as to speak it "better than the natives around here" ...is a man who tries basically to rape the culture into which he is sent, and he must expect the corresponding reactions... He continues to "do things for people" and considers them ungrateful because they understand that he does these things to bolster his ego...

It requires much courage at this point to return to the patient silence of interest or to the delicacy of the silence within which words grow.

What brought me back to that passage tonight was an account (courtesy of Juliet E McKenna) of Alan Garner's appearance at last year's Cheltenham Literary Festival, where he told the story of The Stonebook Quartet, which is the story of his family:

Alan talked of childhood visits to his grandfather; of the way silence was as much a part of conversations as words, and how he absorbed knowledge of local family, history and legend by osmosis. How for him, family became something between linear time and a time beyond history, a universality. As he grew older, he realised that local stories attributed to a stone-cutting great-great grandfather couldn’t possibly be quite true. Later, he learned that this is a feature of folk-myth, where significant local features and stories are successively tied to real figures on the upper limit of local living memory. So to question the truth of such a story is to completely miss the point.

What leapt at me was the bit about the role of silence in conversation - and Garner is, by all accounts, as outstanding a linguist as was Illich - but on re-reading, I notice that the last line of that paragraph is also a version of Anthony's maxim, for to question the truth of the story is to make the words matter overly.

(These are strange things to say, for few handle words with so great a respect as Alan Garner - yet to do so is to recognise their strangeness, just as the Biblical literalist denies it. To idolise something is, by this line of thought, a form of disrespect.)

I am fascinated by the kind of common ground which is invisible to the categories into which writers and thinkers are conventionally sorted. So that I find resonances again and again between Garner and Illich, or between either and John Berger, Hugh Brody, Rowan Williams and so on. (You are unlikely to spot such resonances if you place importance on the labels which attach to a writer, so that Garner is a children's novelist, Berger an old Marxist art critic and Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury - another case of letting the words matter too much.)

sMary tells me that I go about constructing subterranean canons - which is fine, so long as it's clear that these alignments of names and texts are improvised to fit the moment, not presented as an alternative pantheon. (A moment may be a single conversation or a life's work.) If they are helpful, it is in the way that a map sketched in the mud may help:

A mud map is the map a farmer draws on the ground for a passing traveller. It is rough and ready, not very detailed, and lacks nuance. The scale may be inaccurate. But the map has on it the details needed for the journey.

(Thanks to Jan Thomas for the 'mud map' analogy, which I find very helpful.)

How 'life' came to justify boundless acquisition

"I do not believe that there is a single concept at this moment which deserves denunciation as intensively as the concept of life.

The concept of life in the West results from a perversion of the Christian belief according to which God, who is Life, became man. From this promise, this offer of a gift, this mysterious opening to what lies beyond, a this-worldly entity was derived. Life became an immanent idol, an all-purpose polemical label, a conceptual justification for boundless acquisition in this world.

Indeed, life permits the formation of a foundational category, separate from the cosmos, for possessive individualism. From there it is easy to see the leaps to the struggle for life against nature, other individuals and society.

In this construction, life cannot be understood apart from the "death of nature." In a continuous thread that runs back to Anaxagoras (500 - 480 BC) and up through the sixteenth century, an organic, whole conception of nature was a constant theme in the West. With varying nuances and emphases, nature was seen as alive, sensitive, at times animistic, correlated with human action.

With the Scientific Revolution, a mechanistic model came to dominate thinking - nature was then seen as dead. This death of nature, I would argue, was the most far-reaching effect of the radical change in man's vision of the universe. But an insistent question then presented itself: How do we explain the notion of living forms in a dead cosmos?

The modern substantive concept of life thus appears as a kind of mindless movement to fill the void."

Illich

More Illich

[From 'The Shadow Which The Future Throws']

Illich: The 'information revolution'... has injected new life into what would otherwise have been the exhausted logic of industrial development. This encourages expectations that, through his tools, man can escape the limits of his condition.

The social and mental construct called digital information, based on either/or, yes/no, zero/one, black/white, cannot lead us to the condition of post-scarcity. Basing the future on either/or disembedded decision-making cannot escape scarcity. This mode of thinking creates scarcity, by its very definition. Digital decision-making is not language; it is not culture; it can never recover the commons for us. Rather, it is the very creation of the most fluid market ever devised, that of information.

On the other hand, subsistence assumes culturally-bounded growth, that is, a context of commonly defined needs balanced against the limits of nature. Such a social awareness rests upon the historical knowledge of the human condition as precarious.

Gardels: Well, then, given the information revolution, can you entertain any optimism concerning the social embedding of alternatives to development/growth?

Illich: I first distinguish between the attitudes of hope and expectation in front of a "not yet." Expectation is based on a belief in instruments and the naive acceptance of socially constructed certitudes. Hope is based on historically-rooted experience, what Jean Paul Sartre called the "unsquashableness" of the phenomenological.

Giving up all optimism and pessimism, one is free to be courageous; one places no trust in tools and instruments; one comes to a hope based on human beings.

Now, I do see unsquashable signs of hope in the lifestyle of some drop-outs, for example, former professors who learn from subsistence peasants, articulated alliances among green committees, searchers for new options, transnational networks. But my practical phantasy is still unable to envisage how, short of a devastating catastrophe, the assumption on which the new alliances rest could emerge as a general common sense. One reason, I suspect, is that too many of these admirably courageous dissidents remain wedded to ideas like needs, education, health care and
so on.

[More here]

'Discovering the origins of our socially-constructed certitudes'

"In order to find an alternative language, my colleagues and I are devising a dictionary of the history of those terms that are the mythological crystallization points around which modern experience is organized - terms like future, development, growth, participation, liberation, population, need...

"Our method is to go back into history to discover the origins of these socially-constructed certitudes that today dominate the development discourse. Poetry, meditation, etymology, drugs perhaps, the thoughtful recovery of real-life moments in one's past... these are so many different methods to discover the strange origins of our curious assumptions. Only by re-entering the present moment with this understanding will it be possible to establish a new discourse, a new way of seeing, a new set of terms that can guide sustainable 'policies' without recourse to the Nemesis-engendering idea of development."

(Ivan Illich, The Shadow that the Future Throws)