The International Journal of Illich Studies

Mert, Aysem

Review: Unsuspecting Souls: The Disappearance of the Human Being by Barry Sanders

Stuchul, Dana L.

Introduction, Vol. III, No. 2

Olson, Kirsten

Review: Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader

Pierce, Clayton

The International Journal of Illich Studies 2(1) ISSN 1948-4666 DOI 10.4198.211 1 Introduction, Vol. II, No. 1  The legacy of Ivan Illich is indeed a strange one. As a friend pointed out to me recently, even those on the Right1 can claim Illich as an intellectual hero who stood against big government and fiscal folly. But what does it mean when The American Conservative (co-founded by Patrick Buchanan) now lauds Illich as a great, lost intellectual forefather?2 In a sense the author of The American Conservative’s February, 2010 article entitled, “The People’s Priest,” Chase Madar, is correct: Illich was anti-government and ardently against state building projects. Yet, what the Right’s transmogrifcation of Illich’s legacy does not recognize is the fact that Illich was very much invested in a development project. Just not one that centered on property rights and institutional power, but rather the moral worth of every person. You see what is strange about a selective celebration of Illich by some on the Right is that you can’t have a libertarian political intervention or future without a corresponding reinvestment (what Debord called “détournement”) of the social forces now being corralled headlong into all-manner of global neoliberal complexes of power. That is, Illich can’t properly be hailed as a forgotten ideological saint who championed the dissolution of big government and the growth of corporate-state services while not also recognizing that he stood for something else, an alternative to modern society as Illich would put it. It is this other aspect of Illich’s legacy that I take exception to in Madar’s rendition of an Illich revival by the Right: Illich was quite clear as to what an alternative to a modern capitalist society should look like and while he may have broken bread on occasion with Jerry Brown he would never do so with Pat Buchanan or those who think the need to conserve the cultural commons is equivalent to pulpit pounding on behalf of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution and other traditions based upon preserving a history of white supremacy. If Illich at times openly fought with Freire, he did not then by default approve of E. D. Hirsch. If the National Organization of Women found Illich’s views on gender offensive, it did not mean that he was one step away (his views on government notwithstanding) from an appointment in the Reagan administration as its Czar on Family Values. Illich was/is an extraordinary wildcard to a system that is one-dimensional in its party approach to political representation—one is either a Democrat or Republican—in which the status quo always prevails regardless. Tools for Conviviality, for instance, one of Illich’s earliest attempts at working through alternatives to notions of modern industrial progress, stands for a society whose culture is not one that is based on the value structure of the commodity and the market. In other words, convivial society for Illich means a rejection of modern apparatuses of control and management such as the World Bank and IMF that peddle development projects                                                         1 This is not the place for detailed analysis of where The American Conservative or the author of its article on Illich fit on the political spectrum. It should be noted that the magazine claims to be the mouthpiece for conservatives in a “post-Right” world. In taking stands, albeit for financial reasons and not moral ones, against war and the corporatization of individuals’ lives, The American Conservative is not congruent with the policy formation of the previous Bush administration, on the one hand, and much of the “news” that pours forth from other Rightist organs such as Fox or The Weekly Standard. Still, a careful examination of many of the contributors to the magazine will find a who’s who of many political insiders on the Right of the last thirty-odd years (as well as some others of more politically ambiguous persuasions), and my argument would be that the Right is not a definitive ten-point plan that all ascribe to but rather a dynamic hegemony that is built out of various factions that come into alliance around certain sets of agreement. Thus, The American Conservative reaches out to a particular segment of the Right’s base, just as does Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, William Kristol, and so on. 2 Chase Madar, “The People’s Priest: Ivan Illich Understood the Dangers of Trying to Save the World” The American Conservative, February 1, 2010. The International Journal of Illich Studies 2(1) ISSN 1948-4666 DOI 10.4198.211 2 based on property rights and an overall ethic of privatization. Yet Illich’s understanding of the commodity society was not solely a Marxist one—it also extended Marx’s critique of capital beyond the limits of the worker, the colony, and the factory. Illich was one of the first to see that what also came along with the commodity society was not just the dehumanization of people; there was also a pernicious myth of progress that was locked into even Marx’s critique of industrial capitalism. In this sense, if we can thank Marx for teaching us about the ways in which the ruling elite and experts work feverishly to convince us of the greatness of the virtues of their vision of a society built upon human exploitation, then we have Illich to thank for calling into question the idea that modern progress, even when harnessed for use on behalf of a socialist or communist society, is perhaps a path better not taken.  It is this aspect of Illich’s critique of modern society that we must never loose sight of, his recognition of the fact that being anti-government and anti-state also means being for people, but not the atomistic individual (who is assumed to be, ideologically at least, a white, property-holding male) that the Right would like to read into Illich’s work. Nor does Illich’s critique of behemoth structures of power such as the church, school, medical system, or interstate freeway suggest that these models of modern progress are worth keeping around even if they are under the management of more enlightened folks. Illich thus does offer an alternative society in his work that is not just built around a blind faith in people, it is a faith also rooted in values that affirm human scaled, autonomous, and convivial forms of life that are in balance with each other and the larger regional ecology of which they are a part. Herein lies perhaps Illich’s greatest teaching that a selective understanding of Illich such as Madar’s leaves out: the basis to any convivial society should be one that recognizes limits to growth and celebrates the regenerative power of the commons to derive forms of culture in which people are less dependant and servile to big systems and their tools of domination. The current issue of the IJIS comprises a snapshot of that which might comprise such an alternative society. In the range of articles from this issue that take up different aspects of Illich’s work and legacy, we have a more accurate picture of what Illich’s critique of modern society really entailed. From the desertification of Canadian fisheries, to autonomous feminist political movements in Southern Mexico, to Illich’s own falling out with the Vatican, a revision of school curriculum as a site for ecological re-establishing ecological balance and sanity, and a powerful play on the shadow of institutional life, I am proud to offer this issue as a truer measure of the work of Illich and the vision it puts forth. As Illich never offered a pre-designed plan to alternative models of social life to the modern industrial one, these articles offer a multitude of points of departure for thinking about that other aspect of Illich’s work that was always searching for spaces of renewal.       Clayton Pierce University of Utah Editor September 8, 2010 

English

Introduction, Vol. II, No. 1

Yapa, Lakshman

Ivan Illich: Theories of Poverty and the Politics of Agency

Bazan, Gene

The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666 IJIS$Volume$3$Number$2$$(October$2013)$ 2$ Stari otac, moy brat1 Gene Bazan  Three books catapulted me out of the university by the mid-1970s: Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Each of these was given to me by students, sensing before I did that my destiny ought to lie elsewhere. Over the next several years I would come across Illich’s writings, usually in Stewart Brand’s “Co-Evolution Quarterly.” It was a stroke of cosmic luck for me that his and my paths crossed. I have Rustum Roy, chair of the old STS program at Penn State, to thank for bringing Ivan to Penn State.   On me, Illich practiced a kind of intellectual jiu jitsu – that is, leading me gently in directions I was already leaning.  One of these directions was living outside modern institutions, which in every case have become destructive, repressive, and corrupt. In one discussion about markets, Ivan suggested I look at Karl Polanyi’s Trade and Markets in the Early Empires, which sharpened my perceptions of what markets are and do. Better known is Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, an earlier work which showed how the shapers of modern institutions ripped subsistence out from under the 99% of the occupiers of the 17th and 18th centuries and turned them – and then us – into drones. I have striven to recover some measure of subsistence in my own life, and I hope I’ve passed along Ivan’s gift by helping others do likewise, first with Penn State’s Center for Sustainability and now through Neo-Terra.2 A second vista Illich opened for me centered on those key concepts that have come to define modernity. Here Illich used Ludolf Kuchenbuch’s metaphor of walking backwards in time until the certainties of our western modernity fade and then … disappear. The screen of our computer disappears into the page, the page into the word, and the word into speech. I have been a fan of words since, at 16, I read a dictionary from cover to cover, but it was Illich who pointed out that the word was merely one stage in a stream of modern development.   With Deschooling, Illich helped me understand how to think differently. He instructed me in the art of unpacking words. One of his protégés, Wolfgang Sachs, who I came to admire The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666 IJIS$Volume$3$Number$2$$(October$2013)$ 3$greatly, unpacked the term “development” in his 1992 book, The Development Dictionary. He helped me understand my own work experiences in Yugoslavia, Ghana and Turkey. By dissecting the term “sustainability” in his next book, Global Ecology, Wolfgang shaped my thinking and action when a group of us started the Center for Sustainability at Penn State.   Which brings me to the third move in Illich’s jiu jitsu – his magical conviviality. Is there anyone here this evening who was present the night a magician stopped by Ivan’s ashram on Sparks Street? David Abram, who had wanted to meet Ivan, performed magic tricks with a coin as he regaled us with tales of his trips to visit shamans and healers in different cultures, out of which David wrote, The Spell of the Sensuous.3 Doubtless, all of us have watched one talk show or another; hung out with strangers at a bar or professional meeting; partied with friends. But until I went to the first Illich weekend consultation on Sparks Street, I thought convivial was just a fancy word for having a good time. He, and his band of brainy minstrels, taught me different. Discourse – not mere talk! Collaboration! Exploration! Plus good food, wine, and music.  In Tools for Conviviality4 Illich treats the barriers to conviviality, one of which is radical monopoly. What was at first only accessible to the few, became obtainable for many, until it finally became so necessary that none could do without. That, in a nutshell, is radical monopoly. Cars, with their unacknowledged shadow work, drove out walking and bicycling. Health care drives out caring. And education drives out our own unfettered exploration of the world around us. The autodidact becomes suspect.  On the radical monopoly that is transportation I remember reading, in city planning school in the late sixties, that the average speed of transport in Manhattan was 4 mph. This is a speed of brisk walk. Years passed, and then I came across Ivan’s elegant calculation transmogrifying the majesty of a car to that same brisk walking speed. By the time I was 60, I had worn out three bicycles and clocked more than 60,000 miles. I did the first 30,000 on my own, but Ivan kept me going for the next 30 thousand! When I met Ivan in the late 1980’s I was close to abandoning a lucrative line of economic development consulting. My take on that line of work, it turned out, was based on reasoning put forth by Jane Jacobs in her book, The Economy of Cities. Jacobs was a famous urban activist, first in NYC and later in Toronto. She wrote a path-breaking book in the early sixties which I read in urban planning school titled, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here she The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666 IJIS$Volume$3$Number$2$$(October$2013)$ 4$exposed the dark underbelly of urban renewal. Her next book, The Economy of Cities, addressed what became known as the rustbelt. For her, the solution was “import substitution,” that is, reclaim the economic base of a city by making locally what you find yourself importing. Since I was involved in rustbelt renewal, I glommed onto her solution without giving it the critical thought I had given economic base theory in graduate school. What I had failed to do was get to the core issue.  So how do we get to the core issues? The driving functions of a gnarly problem? I recall the weekend consultation on Sparks Street where the Illich tribe hosted a group of humanist economists, headed up by Mark Lutz, who had just published a book titled, Humanist Economics. The Friday evening socializing was great, but the Saturday session was frought with tension. The climax, for me, came when Jean Robert, one of the Illich core, summarized the entire model of humanist economics by recalling B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism. Skinner developed theories and methods for shaping behavior by linking desired behaviors with rewards. He used pigeons as subjects and food pellets as rewards.  Jean Robert commented that humanist economics did not escape the essential condition of modern economics. “First,” he said, “you have to starve the pigeon.” Of course, this is what Polanyi outlined in The Great Transformation. To get peasants to work in factories, you have to first starve them by denying their subsistence. This is what the enclosures of the 17 and 1800’s did. Jean Robert’s phrase got to the core of modern economics and delivered its coup de grace.   Out of Illich’s insights, and the insights of his protégés and associates, I came to develop my own intellectual jiu jitsu. THANK YOU  IVAN!! Thank you Jean Robert! Thank you Wolfgang!   _____________  Notes:  1.  My father, my brother. Among his many languages, Ivan spoke Serbo-Croation. As I had earlier spent a year there, I was still able to speak a few words with him.   2.  www.neo-terra.org  3.  Excerpt at http://www.primitivism.com/ecology-magic.htm  4.  Text for Tools for Conviviality at:  http://www.mom.arq.ufmg.br/mom/arq_interface/3a_aula/illich_tools_for_conviviality.pdf The International Journal of Illich Studies ISSN 1948-4666 IJIS$Volume$3$Number$2$$(October$2013)$ 5$ Author’s Bio Gene Bazan has spent a large part of his last 30 years working with educational, environmental, civic and business organizations here and abroad on projects, funding, and board and staff development. Dr. Bazan has taught at three universities, in the U.S. and abroad. At Penn State, he helped create the Center for Sustainability and design the first Projects in Sustainable Living course. He has given numerous workshops, talks and tours in Central Pennsylvania on organic gardening since 1998. His university training is in Electrical Engineering & Economics, and his Ph.D. is in City & Regional Planning. Please see http://www.neo-terra.org/Pages/default.aspx for more information about Gene’s current projects. $  

Stari otac, moy brat

Kahn, Richard

Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn

Investigating place-based curriculum and embodied curriculum, the author uses playwriting to explore the body\u27s relationship to land and food. This one-act play penetrates the writings of Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, and others in an attempt to fictionally integrate conviviality with the modern/industrial life. This is an exploration of how our disconnectedness from the earth that characterizes our daily living and learning affects us bodily

Jones, Kristin Dillman

The Body Hazel

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