The International Journal of Illich Studies

Introduction to Special Issue of IJIS
Jeremy Hunsinge

Hunsinger, Jeremy

The International Journal of Illich Studies  ISSN 1948-4666    Introduction  Jeremy Hunsinger   The old normal is not the new normal, and neither normal should be normal at all.  Our world was in crisis before the COVID-19 pandemic, and now we face increasing pressures to change our relationship with the world and each other.  The challenge we are faced with is a challenge Ivan Illich discussed many times; we have built our institutions, tools, and institutions as tools in ways that have led us to this situation. Beyond that, these tools and institutions have momentum and institutionalize the problems they were created to address.  Like medical care that has a lessened motivation to cure you in capitalism because medical care must pursue profit, other institutions are caught in the same bind and trajectories. Before the pandemic, things were, in theory, normal.  Normal in the sense that they were bounded by the amazing and profoundly abnormal.  These abnormal situations were considered exceptional, but still happened enough to make us aware of it.  Whether the abnormal event was; a one in one thousand year storm, a nuclear accident, a volcano erupting, a gas crisis, a neo-fascist uprising, various effects of global climate change, or the multiple messes around technologies and their incorporations.  The normal wasn't normal, but the day to day was at most times for many people reasonably within their expectations, even if it entailed any number of sexisms, racisms, ageisms, capitalisms, or other oppressive/exploitative regimes within it.  People knew to expect the everyday evils of their situatedness, and occasionally people organized to resist and foment change.  People knew the 'law' and 'common-sense ethics' were 1not always on their side, but at least they knew where they stood.  They had a sense of what was changing and what could change, even if that sense was frequently wrong.  In short, people had an operational sense of what they desired to be normal and operated within a world where those operations made them feel normal. Reading Illich allows us to recognize the normally abnormal and abnormally normal situations, diagnose them, and blame the historical and contemporary contingencies that generated them.  From Disabling Professions to Tools of Conviviality to his later works calling for institutional reform, Illich promoted an awareness beyond the situated normality of our everyday lives.  He pointed out that the hegemony was not merely the operations of another, but an operation of ourselves to that other. Illich makes us realize that within the construction of the 'normal' our complicity is explicit. Our willful lack of awareness is diagnosed as part of our problem, and a deepening engagement and will to change would allow people to generate the alternatives to move forward with a better life. After the COVID-19 pandemic passes, and currently, it seems that within a year or two, we will have opportunities to establish a normal that is both different from the pandemic normal and the old hegemonic normal.  We are already practicing difference in our lives. Energy usage is down in the western world, for instance.  Perhaps there is hope for a new normal. The question facing us is, what will that normal be? This special issue challenged authors to confront the possibility of that normal, to reach beyond technological and social solutionism, and find a way forward in conviviality.  It challenged the authors with a very complex set of questions, and the authors responded in greatly diverse and meaningful ways.  Each takes their unique path to think about this new normal. Some of these paths open meaningful dialogues and theoretical trajectories to that new normal, 2and others are fruitful in other ways.  All are worthy of thoughtful engagement and consideration. 3

English

Introduction

Introduction to Special Issue of IJIS
Gustavo Estev

Esteva, Gustavo

The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666  Introduction Gustavo Esteva As we all know, Illich was a prophet. Not a man with a crystal ball, but someone who knew how to read the present and discover deep trends. And so he could anticipate what was going to happen.  In the time of the Cuernavaca pamphlets he could not have anticipated the end of the era of tools, but in the 1980s he knew already that people had been transmogrified into subsystems of systems, that we had entered the era of systems. And he thus anticipated, horrified, the time of Covid-19, the current time. He anticipated the unprecedented situation in which the majority of the people on Earth will passively submit to instructions reducing them to statistical bodies, for which they should care and protect.  In calling for papers for this issue we were fully aware of the highly controversial nature of the theme. First of all, there are many “deniers”, people who pretend that the threat of Covid-19 does not exist or is irrelevant, and also those who resist the policies of the health authorities in the name if individual rights. On the other extreme, many of those confined voluntarily or forced to obey curfew rules and other instructions are really afraid of the danger of the new virus, a danger announced in the name of medical science. In the current social contexts, created by the government, the media and by the medical establishment, any critique of public policies is thus perceived as a kind of irresponsible behavior, which may affect the health of many people; often such critique is assimilated into the opposition of the deniers. 4The current polarization of positions and the subsequent inability to forge a third way was one of the many motives to organize this issue. Illich fully anticipated such polarization, forging his own position between the “left-right” poles. Too, he was fully aware of the frequent misinterpretation of his ideas. What was previously rejected or misunderstood in Illich’s thought can now be acknowledged and incorporated into general awareness. As Giorgio Agamben has written, the time of the legibility of Illich’s writings has arrived.  In different moments, particularly in the last ten years of his productive life, Illich looked for ascetic practices “to keep alive our senses, in the lands devastated by the ‘show’, among overwhelming information, advice in perpetuity, intensive diagnostics, therapeutic management, the invasion of counselors, terminal care, breathtaking speed…” These phrases come from the preface to a collection of essays Illich published in French with the title La perte des sense (“The loss of sense”, Paris: Fayard, 2004). Several essays of that book are especially pertinent for the current discussion.  In 1994, for example, he pronounced in a lecture1 a devastating critique of the very idea of a “self-immune system”. He explains that Medical Nemesis was written to justify the art of living, enjoying and suffering and dying even in the modern culture, shaped by the ideas of progress and comfort, and explains why, in the era of systems, he can no longer use the expression “autonomous coping”. Four years later he spoke during a conference in Bologna: “Lead us not into diagnosis, but deliver us from the evils of health”, as he explains how the pursuit of health dissolves our flesh and our self. In 1999, in his last conversations with David 1 The XII Conference of the Qualitative Health Research Association, at Penn State University Hershey Medical School, that is now the introduction for Medical Nemesis for the new edition of his collected works in French, German and Spanish. Additionally, see Illich’s lecture, “Against Coping” at the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference, Hershey, PA, June 1994. Accessed 7 December, 2020 at https://chamberscreek.net/library/illich/against_coping.html 5Cayley, he explained how “risk awareness”—which is today the very core of the policies and attitudes about Covid-19—generates the loss of the sense of our bodies and is “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.” As we currently observe every day, risk is a mathematical concept, which cannot be applied to any person in particular. It is applied to populations and what can happen to them is expressed in terms of probability. The now common idea of “flattening the curve” is but one instance of risk management applied to populations. To identify oneself with this statistical figment (as millions are doing every day) is to engage, Illich said, in “intensive self-algorithmization,” the effect of which disconnects us from our own bodies, while reducing each to a collection of statistical elements. In the last twenty years of his life, Illich expressed repeatedly his increasing concern with the condition imposed on the people, who can no longer die their own death, those denied a dignified death. In place of the art of dying, which in every culture always expressed a fundamental element of the art of living, an abstract medical intervention reigned. Only a month ago, a medical doctor, a sensitive woman who works in a Covid unit of a Mexican social security hospital, shared with me her anxiety, her suffering, when she was unable to respect the will of a 98 year-old guy who pleaded, from his bed in the hospital: “Please allow me to go to my home, to be with my daughter and my grandson. I don’t want to live any longer. But I want to die in my bed, with my loved ones. I want to die in dignity.” But he was not allowed to go. And the family was not allowed to accompany him in his burial. Against all cultural traditions, funerals were not allowed…to “protect” the people, the body of the beloved family member was deemed a threat. In early April, David Cayley, the Canadian thinker and journalist, published the essay “Questions About the Current Pandemic From the Point of View of Ivan Illich”2. He recalls that 2 Accessed at https://www.quodlibet.it/david-cayley-questions-about-the-current-pandemic-from-the-point. 6Illich’s seminal book Medical Nemesis (1974) is a book about professional power. Cayley describes how the everyday power of contemporary medicine “can be further expanded by what Illich calls ‘the ritualization of crisis.’”  This confers on medicine ‘a license that usually only the military can claim. Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human… Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.   Cayley continues within a footnote to this passage and referencing Illich, “… he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.”  In his article, Cayley also describes how, ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, Illich revisited and revised his argument, explaining how he had been “blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself.” He had “overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and care”. Cayley writes, Medical Nemesis had addressed a citizenry that was imagined as capable of acting to limit the scope of medical intervention. Now (Illich) spoke of people whose very self-image was being generated by bio-medicine. Medical Nemesis had claimed, in its opening sentence, that ‘the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.’ Now he judged that the major threat to health was the pursuit of health itself.    Cayley further explains in his article that Illich’s change of mind emerged from the conviction that the world had undergone an epochal change.  ‘I believe,’ he told me in 1988, ‘that…there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live. Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things. The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, 7in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed. I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.’ Illich characterized ‘the new way of seeing things’ as the advent of what he called ‘the age of systems’ or ‘an ontology of systems…’ A system, conceived cybernetically, is all encompassing – it has no outside. The user of a tool takes up the tool to accomplish some end. Users of systems are inside the system, constantly adjusting their state to the system, as the system adjusts its state to them. A bounded individual pursuing personal well-being gives way to an immune system which constantly recalibrates its porous boundary with the surrounding system.  Within this new ‘system analytic discourse,’ as Illich named it, the characteristic state of people is disembodiment. This is a paradox, obviously, since what Illich called ‘the pathogenic pursuit of health’ may involve an intense, unremitting and virtually narcissistic preoccupation with one’s bodily state. Why Illich conceived it as disembodying can best be understood by the example of ‘risk awareness’ which he called ‘the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.’ Risk was disembodying, he said, because ‘it is a strictly mathematical concept.’ It does not pertain to persons but to populations – no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability. To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage, Illich said, in ‘intensive self-algorithmization.’… His horror was at seeing people reconceive themselves in the image of a statistical construct. For him, this was an eclipse of persons by populations; an effort to prevent the future from disclosing anything unforeseen; and a substitution of scientific models for sensed experience…. Increasingly people were acting prospectively, probabilistically, according to their risk… Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings. This was what Illich meant by ‘self-algorithmization’ or disembodiment.   Six months after that article, Cayley wrote an essay (re-published with permission in this issue), in which he elaborates on all those elements—a pertinent frame for the reflection we attempt here in the special issue of the IJIS. Illich’s eyes throw a lucid light to understand what is happening.  In spite of the claims that most public decisions about the pandemic are based in “science”, there is no scientific study supporting the idea that confinement and distancing of healthy people are the best or even the proper way to deal with Covid-19. Opinion, masquerading as science, now governs—the prejudices of some professionals who’ve abandoned any sense of justice and decency before the emergency.  8Everywhere, adopted policies are destroying the livelihoods of millions of people, perhaps the majority of the population. Even as the number of deaths attributed to the virus is contested, increasingly, evidence is emerging that the number of deaths caused by the situation created by those policies is higher than those attributed to the virus. Death by policy rather than virus is the secret in plain view. A new cult emerges—the general devotion to prescriptions given in the name of medical science—despite the ability of the medical system to deliver what it promises. A recent study of Oxford University found that only 1 in 10 drugs and treatments prescribed by doctors will work. Another study revealed that 70% of all medical research is fraudulent3. For Rob Verkerk, executive and scientific director of the Alliance for Natural Health International, “the official Covid ‘cure’ is turning out to be worse than the disease.”4  Our main concern: the obedience of a third of the people on Earth, and in particular their conviction that they are doing the right thing before the so-called pandemic. It is indeed difficult, at this point, not to see the real nature of the current threat. What we now have is not only an immoral and irresponsible economic and political elite, ready to continue the destruction of the environment and the social fabric. We also have an enormous number of people already formatted as “cybernetic beings”, too easily transmogrified into statistical pigments – the intensive self-algorithmization about which Illich warned us. We are just beginning to see the predictable and perhaps intentional consequences of all of this. The consequences: the immense destruction of livelihoods, in many cases constructed through the patient and courageous effort of generations; the destruction of the social fabric that 3 “Doctor 10%: just one in 10 treatment Works”, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, November/December 2020, pp. 18-20. 4 Rob Verkerk, “Adapt, Don’t Fight”, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, November/December 2020, p. 23. 9is the basic condition for a peaceful social coexistence; the systematic destruction of all the beliefs and institutions constructed in the last 200 years; the continuation and even the intensification of the accelerated destruction of all the gifts of nature; the increasing, obscene concentration of wealth in always fewer hands, thus deepening inequalities; the massive increase in the biased use of violence, making evident its racist and sexist character—all this and many other evils are now extended in the name of “saving lives.” Even worse, the widespread and largely passive acceptance by a great number of people of the pandemic policies as the right thing to do by, demonstrate both the loss of their reasoning abilities—informing both their behaviors and their moral judgments—while revealing acquiescence to the rules of this new “cult”, the biomedical catechism. These elements are addressed in different ways in many of the articles included in this issue. Many of the articles offer a reflection about how to react in the face of current challenges, with clear emphasis on Illich’s insights. To understand Illich’s insights requires going beyond the right-left poles of the political spectrum in which contemporary issues are framed. To be among the Left is to be pro-science, to be all-embracing of quarantine policies, to advance liberal/neo-liberal and democratic interventions. To be among the Right is to be anti-science, to reject infringement of an unfettered individual “freedom,” to exalt the Market and to impugn the State. Classifying Illich’s insights—utilizing these two dominant polarities—obliterates possibilities inherent in them, while blinding us to the countless alternatives now manifesting around the world; the diversity celebrated in all his writing.    A glaring omission within this special issue is a collection of stories about how people around the world, particularly among indigenous communities, are demonstrating amazing resilience, responding to the ‘new normal’ with ingenuity, courage and lucidity. They are using 10their traditions, their moral judgment, their rational evaluation and a fascinating juxtaposition of knowledge from different sources. Having discovered the very patriarchal nature of the Covid ‘cure’ they have instead opted for resisting it. These stories are indeed so abundant and impressive that we are now organizing a special issue to present them, separately. We are convinced that these initiatives clearly resonate with Illich’s notion of conviviality and in a very real sense represent an institutional inversion as suggested by Illich in Tools for Conviviality. We hope that the reader will find within this collection of essays alternative ways of thinking, of being in relationship to the “novel Covid-19” virus, of “conviviality for the day ‘after normal.’”     San Pablo Etla, December 2020     11

Samuel, Sajay

The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666  Introduction  A Cosmic Thinker Sajay Samuel, Samar Farage There are no living without the dead, writes Jean Robert in one of his essays that Samar and I have selected for this issue of IJIS. We were prompted to this effort by his life-long partner Sylvia Marcos and aided by the gracious welcome of the editors of IJIS, notably Dana Stuchul. In 2018 we curated a sheaf of his essays for this journal. Jean was the senior if silent partner in that effort. For this collection, we celebrate the lifework of Jean Robert, without his guiding hand. We are sad but we are not alone because there are no living without the dead.  To fashion a frame on which to mount his writings is no easy task for a few reasons. First, these are remnants — previously unpublished essays — that don’t neatly belong under one subject heading. All who have encountered his foraging mind will not be surprised by the range of topics and references here. Second, though most were complete, some were in various stages of completion. These latter demanded making difficult editorial and publishing decisions. We encountered numerous instances of unwieldy sentences, seemingly oral utterances jotted down, and a fair sprinkling of foreign words in these English texts. Translation is a treason and that is especially so when editing the texts of a man who was comfortable thinking in at least six languages. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the order we present these selected essays reflect our effort to understand Jean’s thought. To those who say we pass off what is ours as his, we reply, with Jean, there are no dead without the living.  1We present eight essays and one book outline for this collection. The first essay draws on a book he co-authored with Majid Ranehma in 2008 about the Potency of the Poor (La Puissance des pauvres). In the wake of the world-wide financial crisis of 2008-9, they make an impassioned case for what they call “subsistence knowledges.” Economic science, they say, is congenitally incapable of comprehending the distinction between poverty and misery. Poverty remains an ineradicable dimension of the human condition. The combination of low levels of buying goods and services and high levels of self-sufficiency has been the historical norm. In contrast, widespread misery is the historically unprecedented condition of almost total dependence on cash for even basic sustenance combined with the almost total absence of conditions that permit self-sufficiency. Misery is poverty without the means of autonomous subsistence. By that measure, the so-called rich are even more miserable than the poor. Their anxiety and rapaciousness reflect what they secretly know but cannot acknowledge: unlike the poor, the so-called rich could not last a day without their cash. Economic science cannot help conflating the distinction between poverty and misery. It is to prevent the rich and the economist from further immiserating the poor that Jean argues for the return of subsistence knowledges. These are ways of knowing that foster ways of being relatively free from debilitating dependence on the market. There are two broad streams of subsistence knowledges: the one borne of common sense, appropriate to each place, grounded in common experience, and respectful of the human condition as being rooted in necessity. The other stream of subsistence knowledges entails the arduous effort to clear away the accumulated historical debris formed by scientific knowledges that confuses reason, clouds perception, and prevents autonomous action.  Is there thought after economics? asks Jean in the second essay in this series. Following Illich, he argues for three kinds of political limits on the techno-scientific production of goods 2and services. Not only a limit on the industrial production of goods to preserve the environment; not only a limit on the professional production of services to make room for communal action; but also a limit on the economic sphere, as such. The destruction of the commons by the expanding economic sphere is enabled by economic science that is necessarily blind to the   commons. If we are to escape from our servility to the economic, implies Jean, we must topple the dismal science from its high perch. One cannot escape from scientific ways of knowing unless one is grounded in and by the senses.  In the next two essays, Jean focuses his attention on an utterly familiar aspect of our technological condition — the contrast between auto-mobility and being carried in automobiles — to prove how “subsistence knowledges” can and indeed must be grounded in common experience. Walking and being moved are scientifically described as alternative modes of locomotion. But phenomenologically, these experiences are incomparable. Relying on the work of Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty, Jean underscores the pedestrian condition as one of “immersion and embodiment.” In contrast, mechanized locomotion necessitates the severance of sight from bodily movement. The immobile body in a speeding car-seat “sees” the environment as a moving series of images that flash past. The landscape reduced to a series of moving images is a consequence of “the disembodiment of motion.” That the world is put into motion or at least appears as such to the passenger or driver who is immobile is the paradoxical effect of vehicularization. In fact, the windshield view is a form of seeing just as mediated as the views obtained at the lens of a microscope or telescope. Long training in seeing through such instruments is needed to observe what is supposed to be seen through them. For example, the astronomer must be taught to ignore much of what appears on the telescopic lens to be able to see the star. Jean proposes the phrase “tachyscopic perception” to refer to what is seen when one 3is enclosed in objects moving through space at high speed (cars, trains, buses). In the essay on “the stuff of traffic landscapes,” Jean emphasizes the singular optical illusion produced by such a kinetic perspective. The stuffiness of the world, its materiality, its thinginess, is dissolved into a fleeting slideshow of images because the viewer is carnally severed from it.  Transportation science cannot grasp the phenomenological distinction between walking and being carried just as economic science cannot grasp that between poverty and misery. The former is mired in the notion of transport as means of locomotion, itself understood as mere displacement in space. The latter is stuck in the idea of scarcity understood as the problem of allocating insufficient means to satisfy proliferating ends. Both sciences presuppose the means- ends relation which Jean critically dissects in the fifth essay titled, “The Rise and the Death of the Instrumental Paradigm.” The assertion that cars or markets are means to an end presupposes that means are distinct from ends. However, if the car transforms the built landscape in a way that offices are located far away from homes thus necessitating the commute, then it makes little sense to say that “one needs a car to get to the office.” The purported purpose of the car — reaching the office —has been shaped by the car —the supposed means. The empty roads and empty offices of the Covid-19 months have decisively revealed how urban landscapes are built for the car. In situations where means cause the ends, which is to say in situations of tight feedback loops or circular causality, the logic of X as a means for Y is invalid. In fact, when means produce ends, one is condemned to live without ends, as such. Jean names this an infernal condition, with all the theological resonances that word carries.  When cars increase in number and speed, they define the purposes for which they are driven. The result is the topsy-turvy world where ends and means cannot be distinguished. The short essay titled, “Auto-Stop,” which Jean co-authored with Illich, is a quasi-serious proposal to 4limit the number of cars. It builds on Energy and Equity by Illich in which he argued for limiting the speed of cars. Illich and Robert wrote this radical manifesto well before Uber or Lyft. The core of their proposal is simple: All cars using public roads must be potential taxis and all drivers must be paid for their services. By this one act, they suggested, “a small change in the character  of transportation [could] lead to a moral reevaluation of place.” However, the age of Uber is also the age of Tesla and their proposal for “Auto-stop,” like that of speed limits no greater than twenty- five miles an hour, now reads as a cautionary tale.  These six essays occupy the branch of “subsistence knowledges” rooted in common experience, common sense, and grounded in the perception of necessity as inextricable with the human condition. In the remaining essays, Jean explores the second branch of subsistence knowledge which is concerned with studies that clear away the accumulated detritus of engineered perception. Just as black print on a white page aids reading, so also to properly grasp the present requires a contrasting moment. The foreignness of our past serves as a more reliable touchstone than any imagined future in order to evaluate the present. Jean practiced the kind of history that Illich and Foucault did. Since all things that have a beginning can have an end, he sought the beginnings of familiar things to better understand their end. When did the idea of space take shape, how was it complicit in the ways cities and freeways were constructed, what ways of being and thinking did it cast into the shadows? By bringing the present into clear relief against the contrast of the past, Jean forces the reader to become uncomfortable with what is taken-for-granted and to thereby begin the journey of becoming another.  The next essay is just such a prod to becoming estranged from the present. A red thread running to many of Jean’s works is the built environment, or better, the modes in which peoples have dwelled. In his reflection on “the idea of a town,” Jean explores the very distinction 5between the city and the country; between the urban and the rural, that is both considered obvious and under dissolution today. The expanding slums and shantytowns of the Global South are now increasingly mirrored by the inner cities and banlieues of the North. This growing intermingling of city and country undermines the idea that the urban consumes what the rural produces and that the city cultures the country. The ruins of the clear demarcation between urban and rural is hyped in some quarters as the birth pangs of the new networked city built on the communication technologies. According to these futurists, the difference between New York and Iowa is the degree to which they are networked— the relative density in the flow of water, waste, information, supplies, and people. In contrast, Jean reaches back into the distant past —the Neolithic period — to uncover the lived distinction between horticulture and agriculture. It is still a popular notion that agriculture both replaced hunter gatherer economies and produced the surpluses necessary to support the growth of cities. However, Jean insists, there is an intermediate stage of horticulture, of gardening, that began and persisted in urban locales. As recently as in the Paris of Victor Hugo, many cities produced enough food in urban gardens to nourish a third of their population. It is precisely the early networked city — macadamized on the surface and riddled by a sewer system underground—that decisively separates the city from the country and requires the urban to be fed by rural.  Even more upsetting of settled ideas are his essays into the historicity of technology. His considered thoughts on the subject, he told us, are in a book as yet only available in Italian, titled L”eta dei sistemi nel pensiero dell”ultimo Illich. Expanding on suggestions by Illich, he argues that the era of the instrument or technology is over, to be replaced by the system. The instrument which also underwrites the means-end paradigm, presupposes a distance or distality between the user and the tool. Anyone can pick up the hammer to deploy the mechanical intention — 6hammering —that is captured in it. And anyone can just as easily lay it down. In contrast, once one interacts with a system one cannot put it down. The cell phone, the computer, even the interstate road system are “pseudo-tools” because they demand that you fit into them as a node or sub-system. As such, humans are transformed into systemic interfaces. Proper attention to this  phenomenon, asserts Jean, will disclose the gulf between the instrument or tool which one can use and a system in which one is enmeshed. No wonder the dominant ways of dealing with this emerging and fast hardening systemic milieu are “adaptation,” “resilience,” and in general, “going with the flow.” The end of the age of technology also prompts questions about its beginning.  Jean — the architect and historian — tracks the age of technology or the instrument by following changes in the sense of “here” and “there.” In a series of broad strokes, Jean sketches the prehistory of the instrument in the idea of proportion and its emergence as instrumentum separatum in the idea of the Christian minister who acts as the instrument of God’s will. A topo-cosmic understanding of oneself entailed awareness of the relation between place (topos) and order of places (cosmos). Here and there, like inside and outside, now and then, and up and down express a proportionate relationship within a mutually ordered couplet. All things find their meaning and measure in and by other things to which they are related. The indifferent unidimensional expanse of space which replaced the notion of topocosmos is itself, Jean suggests, coming to an end. Space implies a finite if arbitrarily defined region. One is located in space by some version of the Cartesian coordinates. Here and there are arbitrary points with reference to some equally arbitrary point of origin. The disappearance of the technological milieu is marked by the dissolution of this idea of a container-like space. It is no accident that “location” in the age of computer systems means a collection of bits across databases. Accordingly, the 7mutation from the topocosmos to space and the further break between space and system-without-a-locus is one way to mark the birth and death of the instrument. Illich once noted that the Greek etymology of “cosmic” does not refer to the large and unlimited. In contrast, it referred to the bounded and the relational, as for example, the two lines formed by armies facing each other or the two banks of a river. It is a cosmic thinker who insists there are no living without the dead.  We have included two further items in this collection that hint at these arguments. Both also speak to the collaborative nature of Jean’s mode of life and the inextricable welding, in his person, of thinking and living. The first is a long “preparatory note” Jean wrote in preparation for a 2010 seminar in Paris. We include it here not only to reaffirm the broad and synthetic scope of his thought. Above all, it also reveals the generosity of the man. Always thinking in the company of others and always ready to share references and provide criticisms, Jean embodied the manner of a vernacular thinker—not for him the possessiveness over ideas, the ownership of thought, the imagined scarcity of thinking. Instead, as his notes prove, thought is, for Jean, one of the communal exercises in learning to live together well. The last “paper” we include in this collection is a sketch for a project of a bilingual book, in German and English. In it he wanted to explore the transition from “place perceptions to spatial misplaced concreteness” or the destruction of topocosmic relations. Yet, he was insistent that nothing is lost forever and that nothing reappears exactly as it once was. He was convinced or at least hoped that such rests or remains of the past that persist in the present could liberate new forms of thinking and being. The project was unfinished at the time of his death. Both these of are invitations to the reader to think and write with their author. As Jean Robert implied, there are no dead without the living.  8

Introduction - A Cosmic Thinker

Robert, Jean

Spanish

La construcción social del sexo

Las aguas arquetípicas y la globalización del desvalor

A Reflection on “The Idea of a Town” and on the Reality of Cities in an Uncertain Time

Prologo

The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666 Contra la riqueza empobrecedoraJean Robert La crisis económica que ha fracturado al mundo y ha generado la aparición de diversos movimientos sociales en todo el planeta, tiene su origen en las contradicciones propias de esa economía que nació con el capitalismo. En el presente texto, leído durante el cuarto encuentro que la Universidad de la Tierra Chiapas realizó sobre los movimientos antisistémicos a finales de 2011 y principios de 2012, Jean Robert, resumiendo el libro que escribió con Majid Ranhema, La potencia de los pobres, y, retomando de una manera finamente didáctica las tesis del primer capítulo de El capital de Marx, muestra no solo la sustancia de esa contradicción, sino también una vía de salida a las mismas, una vía sobre la que los movimientos sociales deben pensar para darle mayor sentido a su radicalidad.Un aspecto del libro que escribí con Majid Rahnema, La potencia de los pobres, que publicó recientemente la Universidad de la Tierra, es la crítica que hacemos al concepto de “riqueza” pregonado por la economía capitalista. En casi todos los países, los economistas pretenden medir la riqueza en cantidad de valores acumulados. Y, ¿qué son esos valores? Son mercancías. No otra cosa, dice Karl Marx en las primeras frases de El capital: “La riqueza de 295aquellas sociedades en las que prevalece el modo de producción capitalista se presenta como ‘una inmensa acumulación de mercancías’”.1Este tipo de medición de la riqueza permite que, en las sociedades en que se practica —las sociedades capitalistas— haya cada vez más cosas útiles en las bodegas y gente inútil en la calle o, mejor dicho, gente vuelta inútil, gente inutilizada, gente expropiada de sus poderes de palabra y de acción, gente callada políticamente, gente pauperizada y vuelta impotente. Eso son los pobres modernos, “los pobres modernizados”, como decía Iván Illich. Es cada vez más evidente que la sociedad moderna pauperiza, es decir, vuelve a la gente cada vez más pobre. Esa pauperización es la consecuencia del concepto de pobreza que prevalece en las sociedades capitalistas que, a su vez, es la consecuencia directa del concepto capitalista de riqueza que acabamos de mencionar. La pobreza capitalista es la imagen invertida de la riqueza capitalista, laque se mide en valor, es decir, en dinero. La primera ha sido cuantificada por el Banco Mundial: ganar, por ejemplo, menos de un dólar al día es igual a pobreza absoluta; ganar menos de dos dólares al día es igual a pobreza relativa. Según esas definiciones, hay en el mundo 2 millones 800 mil pobres absolutos y un millón 200 mil pobres relativos. Juntos, representan 56 % de los hombres. Pero el Banco Mundial sabe calibrar sus datos. Según sus criterios, solo hay en el mundo 38 % de pobres absolutos. Son muchos, muchísimos, pero ya que hay más de 7 mil millones de personas en el mundo, los pobres absolutos siguen siendo una minoría. Entonces, el caso normal es la no-pobreza. Entonces, los pobres relativos se pueden representar como pobres en tránsito hacia la no-pobreza. Así la pobreza se puede mostrar como un caso anormal. Esa anomalía o desviación de la normalidad es una especie de enfermedad que debe curarse. Hay que, ironizaba Iván Illich, adoptar hacia los pobres una actitud de tolerancia terapéutica. Hay queser tolerantes con ellos mientras aceptan someterse a las terapias que los ricos inventaron para 1 Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy ( New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1906)  41. 296“curar su pobreza”. Si se resisten a ellas —muchas veces son “medidas económicas”— hay que usar métodos más contundentes. En esta misma lógica, para las estadísticas del Banco Mundial, el que gana tres dólares al día no es pobre, ni absoluta ni relativamente. Tres dólares diarios son 35 pesos, al mes, casi 900 pesos. Creo, contra todo eso, que hay que rechazar simultáneamente el concepto de “riqueza” y el de “pobreza” de los economistas. Quizás debería decir de “los economistas capitalistas”, pero no existen otros.¿Hay, sin embargo, otro tipo de “riqueza” que no consista en la acumulación de mercancías? Sí. ¿Merece aún el nombre de “riqueza”? ¿No sería mejor hablar de prosperidad? O,como algunos compañeros andinos dicen, del “buen vivir”? ¿Puede haber sociedades prósperas en las que no haya sobreabundancia de mercancías, sociedades donde la prosperidad no consista en valores acumulados, sino en las capacidades, las habilidades y la fuerza de la gente, sociedades que se basen no en la acumulación de cosas ya hechas, sino en la capacidad de hacerlas?El libro que escribí con Rahnema es una investigación sobre estas otras formas de riqueza y las formas de pobreza correspondientes. Es lo que quisimos anunciar cuando lo titulamos La potencia de los pobres.  La idea de hablar de la potencia de la gente más que de sus “riquezas” nació en el corazón de un filósofo que vivió hace más de 350 años y que se llamaba Baruch o Benedicto Spinoza. Digo que nació en su corazón, porque este hijo de rico era pobre de corazón. Se deshizode la herencia paterna y vivió en la pobreza voluntaria. Solo así, decía, podía ser libre para 297pensar. Rechazó todos los honores. Era uno de los filósofos más grandes de su tiempo, pero nunca quiso enseñar en universidades. Toda su vida trabajó para mantenerse. Pulía lentes.Hace varios años, aquí, en la Universidad de la Tierra, cuando se rindió homenaje al maestro Andrés Aubry que acababa de fallecer, se le otorgó un doctorado post mortem por su defensa del conatus de la gente, un doctorado liberationis conatus causa, se escribió en latín. Conatus era una palabra de Spinoza: el conatus es la forma más íntima de las ganas de vivir, de seguir siendo lo que uno es, de la fidelidad a uno mismo. Es la potentia original. Algo un poco como nuestra enjundia, dijimos entonces. La potentia es la raíz de toda autonomía. En cambio, en el capitalismo, la “riqueza” es la cantidad de mercancías con la que uno tiene que vivir, unos pocos poseyéndolas, la mayoría, envidiándolas. Respecto a la envidia, los que conocen algo de la historia de las ideas económicas recordarán que 17 años antes de publicarsu Investigación sobre la naturaleza y causa de la riqueza de las naciones (1776), el padre de la economía moderna, Adam Smith, había escrito un primer libro titulado La teoría de los sentimientos morales (1759). En ese libro, Smith no preguntaba ¿cuales son la naturaleza y la causa de las riquezas? Preguntaba: “¿Por qué queremos ser ricos?”. Y no respondía, “porque queremos vivir bien”. Simplemente afirmaba que no se necesita la riqueza, basta llevar una vida frugal moderadamente laboriosa. La razón por la que un hombre quiere ser rico es, decía Smith, que quiere atraer la simpatía de los demás. Hoy, en vez de simpatía, diríamos envidia. Para eso sirve la riqueza. Para volvernos objeto de la envidia de los otros. Para el que vive en medio de esta forma de riqueza, nunca habrá suficiente. Es una adicción. El exceso de mercancías mata el conatus y fomenta la impotencia. Cuando el mundo se atiborra de cosas útiles, hay cada vez más gente inútil. Las promesas de este tipo de riqueza son palabras envenenadas. 298Hace muy poco cambiamos de presidente y de partido en el poder. Peña Nieto, al igual que los otros candidatos que contendieron por la Presidencia de la República, propone volver a los ciudadanos más “ricos”, más envidiosos, es decir, más impotentes ¿Hay otras opciones que las que nos proponen los políticos?Marx no podía predecir a qué niveles de impotencia iba llevar la invasión de las mercancías y, sobre todo, de esas mercancías inmateriales que llamamos “servicios”. Hoy podría complementar su famosa frase así: la riqueza de aquellas sociedades en las que prevalece el modo de producción capitalista se presenta también como “un enorme atiborramiento de servicios”, algunos facultativos, muchos, obligatorios. Me perece importantísimo saber distinguirentre dos tipos de situaciones muy diferentes: la falta de servicios llamados “básicos” en las regiones muy pobres y su excesiva proliferación en los barrios ricos de las grandes ciudades.En los años setenta, la ciudad de Cuernavaca, donde vivo, fue una capital intelectual mundial en la que se elaboró por primera vez una crítica radical de los servicios, no de los que faltan, sino de los que sobran y agobian. Eran años en los que se empezaba a entender la destrucción ecológica causada por la producción de mercancías: la producción de mercancías en exceso daña la naturaleza. La crítica a los servicios que nacieron en el Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) se inauguró con la frase que Iván Illich pronunció en 1970: “Más allá deciertos límites, la producción de servicios hará más daño a la cultura que la producción de mercancías a la naturaleza”. En seguida, Illich analizó sucesivamente las instituciones de servicios de educación, de transporte motorizado y de medicina. Cada una de estas instituciones, descubrió, había rebasado los límites críticos y se había vuelto contraproductiva. Para explicar esta contraproductividad se puede decir, caricaturizándola un poco, que cuando se rebasan 299límites razonables las escuelas apendejan, los transportes paralizan y hacen perder tiempo y los hospitales enferman.  Aunque Marx no podía prever la extensión de la catástrofe ecológica, entendió su causa y la nombró el “fetichismo de la mercancía”. Considero que ese descubrimiento es una de sus aportaciones principales. La palabra “fetiche” designa una cosa innatural, por ejemplo, un ídolo. El fetichismo de la mercancía es una especie de adoración de las mercancías, como si fueran ídolos. La sociedad capitalista atiborra a los ricos de mercancías y servicios mientras alienta la envidia de los pobres por cosas que nunca podrán tener. La posesión excesiva de los ricos y el fomento de la envidia de los no ricos son las dos caras de la idolatría capitalista. Más allá de ciertos límites, tanto el atiborramiento del uno por ciento como la envidia del 99 por ciento matan el conatus, el apetito de vivir, las ganas de hacer cosas y fomentan la impotencia. Esel punto a partir del cual el capitalismo vuelve a todos miserables. Creo que lo que los financieros llaman “la crisis” es simplemente el haber llegado a este punto de no retorno. Se puede analizar esta miserabilización general a través de los tres mercados dominantes que, en la sociedad capitalista, determinan todos los otros: el mercado del dinero (piensen en las Bolsas y la economía financiera), el mercado de la tierra, es decir, de los predios y bienes inmuebles, y el mercado del trabajo. El dinero es una relación de poder que aparece como la medida del trabajo que necesitó la producción de mercancía y de servicios. El fetichismode la mercancía oculta esta relación de poder entre los hombres y la hace parecer como una relación entre cosas. La tierra es el territorio, el terruño, como decía Andrés Aubry. El fetichismo de la mercancía niega la relación de los hombres con su terruño y le da un precio, como si la tierra fuera una mercancía. Uno de los peores horrores del presente es el asesinato de gente del campo que defiende su territorio. Finalmente, el trabajo es el hombre mismo, su fuerza, la 300potencia de su cuerpo. El fetichismo de la mercancía desencarna al hombre como si le robara su cuerpo. 301

Contra la riqueza empobrecedora

Sicilia, Javier

Jean Robert, una clave de interpretación

The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666 Autostop Ivan Illich, Jean Robert We want to tell a story that reflects some nonsense about our way of life, and that story is about traffic. We tell the story because we believe that tomorrow morning all could live in a more quiet and perhaps even bicycle-centered society if only people believed that modesty can guide political choice. Reasoning shows that transport can enhance freedom of movement only within the limits in which one can renounce it. Today, such renunciation is barely viable in a society where the traffic jam has become paradigmatic for all kinds of consumption. Transportation, public or private, carries inevitable consequences. Beyond a certain threshold, it diminishes personal mobility in proportion to more passenger miles generated. Thus transportation is a monument to the basic experience of the age. The more refined and more integrated the transportation system, the more we live in a society of morning joggers tied down during the rest of the day.  Starting with this insight, we invite you to a mental experiment. By limiting the compulsory auto-disempowerment produced by transportation, a society can increase the freedom of movement enjoyed on foot or bicycle. Not so long ago, everyone knew that the world was accessible. And until quite recently, the “third world” lay within reach of their feet for most of its inhabitants. People could trust their feet, experience their world. And for several decades now, U.S. border guards have admitted their helplessness as they are overrun by auto-mobile transgressors - moving on foot.  77In the 1950s, Mexico City was already a metropolis of nearly three million inhabitants, with some forty plazas containing popular markets. Most of these markets were on the same spot where Cortez had found them 450 years earlier. In any given week, less than one out of every hundred persons moved beyond the border of their respective barrio. Since then, the population of the city has increased seven-fold. Engineered traffic patterns tear neighborhoods apart; multi-lane, one-way throughways separate people into artificial ghettoes; a high proportion of the population is the boxed-up victim of daily, long-range transport —there is an efficient subway. Such transport encloses students as well as pensioners, employees as much as women needing pre-natal tests. Five million persons —according to official count —must travel daily to reach inaccessible places. Historically, walking was never an act of pure leisure. At times, it could be dangerous, painful, disappointing, but at other times adventuresome, enjoyable, or exhilarating. But that is not the issue. What counts is that using one’s feet came at no cost. Of course, everyone had to find the pennies to pay the ferryman. A mule or carriage were confined to the rich. Generalized mobility was enhanced by social virtue: tolerance of the outsider, hospitality, charity, and conviviality at resting places. For the majority, these were more important than inns. People lived in the experience that the place on which they stood was a place they had reached with their feet.  We would like to ask a question: What does it mean that so very little of that which enabled and graced freedom came in the nature of a commodity? Now modern engineers claim that feet are underdeveloped means of self-transportation! Indeed, what equipped our forefathers was inexpensive, from staff and sandals to cloak and sack; later, the bicycle. Distances, when they were counted, were measured in days; they were perceived as life time, not as watch time. 78 There was nothing like the concept of a passenger mile on land until the postal coach appeared, late in the 18th century; and then the railroad in the early 19th.  The railroad created the minute and the fare that measured the time cost of bridging passenger miles. These concepts are basic and acquire full validity with motorized traffic. Only on the basis of such assumptions could the locomotion of human beings be made into a commodity. And this commodity — traffic — was produced by employed workers, whether railroad men or chauffeurs, proto-passengers making up the consumers. All this changed with Henry Ford’s Model T. This innovation brought the news that mobility would be an industrial product to be enjoyed only through unpaid labor. Each employee now had the “privilege” of purchasing a car. With this investment, he had to deliver his own work force to the factory door. For many, then, the car became the condition for selling themselves on the labor market, to purchase household needs, to educate their kids, to visit their aged parents.  For twenty-five years we have reflected on transportation because we see in it an ideal type of post-industrial commodities: a synthesis of installment payments, operating costs, insurance premiums, and unpaid labor to make the investment actually useful. Shadow work —the unpaid, time-consuming, disciplined, risky improvement of a commodity to make it pay —became a foundation of modern existence. It is quite surprising how completely this self-enslavement has remained a blind spot of the first two generations of car owners. But we now see that a powerful spell has been cast over them. A mixture of fashion, vanity, commodity fetishism, and greed, sharpened by clever, no-holds-barred advertising created the fantasy of the automobile as a liberator — from schedules, waiting lines, limited horizons, pre-established routes. For most of those born before 1970, the auto is still an enticing symbol of personal 79freedom through an industrial product. But for a later generation, this is a transparent oxymoron. Rarely does one find the distance between two generations so great. Now let us come to our story. And the reader can decide whether it is a serious project or a cautionary tale. The story begins with a judgment, one passed down by the Supreme Court. According to the Court, the use of tax-supported roads shall be limited to vehicles in public service. In effect, this means that every car with a free seat must stop when asked. To implement the decision, Congress passes a law that restricts licenses to drivers who produce passenger-miles and earn income by doing so. No Samaritans needed. Henceforth everyone who is not a driver will be chauffeured, and all drivers are available as chauffeurs.  Is the unthinkable feasible? Can a simple judicial judgment turn the way we now think about economic “goods” topsy turvy? Without any technical innovation, can a society transform its social and physical environment? Can a small change in the character of transportation lead to a moral reevaluation of place?  How to imagine the details? Every citizen receives a Hack-Card. If a would-be passenger signals a passing car with an empty seat, the driver must stop. The car contains a computer with as many slots as there are seats. For the construction of the black box, ways of billing the patrons and paying the drivers, Toshiba and the IRS are obviously competent. Or let Sprint instruct highway departments on the management of channels (they have experience following the court decision on the monopoly formerly enjoyed by Bell Telephone). Let charges be entered on one’s tax return (which could make travel cheap and/or free for those with limited incomes) or let them be sent out like the phone bill today. Place regular waiting stops where people signal their direction, and where every passing car with an empty seat must stop if hailed. Make them cozy or warm on lonely corners, and shade them where the 80sun beats down. Let the people themselves police their waiting lines, as they have learned to do gently in Havana or Mexico. They can report any vehicle which runs a stop. If muggers are rampant in the area, what better place to be but in a car, with one’s Hack-Card signaling the whereabouts for the police? For those who see a project here, there are many practical questions to be examined. For example: How much would traffic accelerate by eliminating tie-ups? How much space would be created for pedestrians and bikes? How many would renounce transportation, and when? And who would finally be able to afford it? How many new jobs would be created for drivers as against those lost in the car industry? What social consequences would result from discontinuing company and government fleet cars? Could one limit the privilege of the policeman to step ahead in line when in uniform? What would be the ecological impact? And would such a decision accelerate the transition to less polluting vehicles? How much would be saved in public investments? How quickly could this saving create the funds to cover the societal “loss” through fewer cars being manufactured, purchased, and driven? How face taxi driver unions when they try to challenge the Supreme Court decision? How tell a better story to open up “the sociological imagination”?  If this is just a cautionary tale, why do we have the experience of people getting angry when we tell it? Are they angry because we do not propose a new technology nor defend an ideology? This seems but a simple proposal for thoughtful consideration. Contribution to a Symposium on bicycle freedoms in Berlin, Summer 1992. 81

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Introduction

Introduction

Introduction - A Cosmic Thinker

La construcción social del sexo

Las aguas arquetípicas y la globalización del desvalor

A Reflection on “The Idea of a Town” and on the Reality of Cities in an Uncertain Time

Prologo

Contra la riqueza empobrecedora

Jean Robert, una clave de interpretación

Autostop

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