Contextual Quote

"In the 1990s he became focused on the notions of proportionality. Most of us did not understand quite what he meant back then. We would walk away from his erudite lectures on the history of proportionality in music and art and shake our heads, wondering, what did he mean? Now, I think he meant the following: What is the appropriate proportion of the use of energy, technology, institutions for a convivial society? How do we know when we have gone too far in our practices of knowledge, rituals, and culture; how can we recognize as a culture when they become threatening rather than liberating? How do we know when we are using too much carbon and make the necessary adjustments to our actions? How do we recognize this and move together on containing the damage? It was another way to expand his earlier idea of “thresholds”."

- Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan [1]

Bio

Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan:

"Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was born in Vienna, Austria to a Catholic father from the Dalmatian Islands in Croatia and a Jewish mother who came from a converted Catholic family, originally from Germany. In the spring of 1984, he related to me the terrors he felt when Nazism arose and took over his worlds in Vienna when he was a teenager from the 1930s to the early 1940s.2He described in an anguished voice, decades after it had happened, the force with which he was humiliated in elementary and middle school because of his Jewishness and the terrors of that time. As a teenager, in the early 1940s, during the height of the takeover of Austria by Germany, he helped his family---his mother and his younger twin brothers---escape Vienna, Austria to Florence, Italy.Once he finished his high school in Florence, he trained intensively at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in theology and felt the intellectual force of another Catholic priest, Jacques Maritain. Illich subsequently received a Ph.D. in history at the University of Salzburg after WWII. Throughout Illich’s life, he actively linked the worlds of the spirit and the material in unique and distinguished ways."

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

Intellectual Bio

1. Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan:

"There were three phases to his adult life which were not distinct and separate but rather overlapped with each other. From 1951 to 1968, he moved in the world primarily as a Catholic priest. He worked with a Puerto Rican community in Harlem in the 1950s. He became fascinated by the ways in which they had come to Catholicism with their own unique cultural gifts. He organized one of the biggest Puerto Rican-American Catholic festivals on the Fordham University campus. Subsequently, he became the Vice Rector at the University of Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico. Then, he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico and started an organization called the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF) in 1961 which later merged into another organization called CIDOC (Centre for Intercultural Documentation). CIDOC was a Spanish language training center for those in the United States who wanted to learn Spanish. Simultaneously, it was a center that ran seminars and courses on the sustainability of contemporary institutions, the ideas behind western civilization and the unrecognized strength and vitality in traditional, vernacular cultures. For nearly its entire existence, CIDOC became very famous and attracted students from all over the world. CIDOC lasted until 1976."

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

2. From http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm :

" Ivan Illich's concern for conviviality - on the ordering of education, work, and society as a whole in line with human needs, and his call for the 'deprofessionalization' of social relations has provided an important set of ideas upon which educators concerned with mutuality and sociality can draw. His critique of the school and call for the deschooling of society hit a chord with many workers and alternative educators. Further, Ivan Illich's argument for the development of educational webs or networks connected with an interest in 'non-formal' approaches and with experiments in 'free' schooling. Last, his interest in professionalization and the extent to which medical interventions, for example, actually create illness has added to the critique of professions and a concern to interrogate practice by informal educators - especially those in more 'community-oriented' work. As Gajardo (1994: 717) has commented, 'if... we separate Illich's thought from its emotional context, it is interesting to realize how thought-provoking some of his suggestions and proposals are'.

Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Celebration of Awareness (Illich 1973: 11) describes Ivan Illich as follows:

- The author is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for man's unfolding - physically, spiritually and intellectually. The importance of his thoughts... lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions.

Ivan Illich's critique of the process of institutionalization in education and his setting of this in the context of the desirability of more convivial relationships retains considerable power. As Finger and Asún (2001: 14-15) have argued, the 'forgotten Illich' offers considerable potential for those wanting to build educational forms that are more fully human, and communities that allow people to flourish. For Illich, and for Finger and Asún (2001: 177), 'De-institutionalization constitutes the challenge for learning our way out' of the current malaise."

(http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm)

Discussion

Ivan Illich on the Recovery of the Commons

1. Ivan Illich:

"“How shall I call the opposite project: the reconquest of the right to live in self-limiting communities, that each treasure their own mode of subsistence. Pressed, I would call this project the recovery of the commons. Commons, in custom and law, refer to a kind of space which is fundamentally different from the space of which most ecologists speak. ... The public environment is opposed to the private home. Both are not what“ commons” mean. Commons are a cultural space that lies beyond my threshold and this side of wilderness. Custom defines the different usefulness of commons for each one. The commons are porous. The same spot for different purposes can be used by different people. And above all, custom protects the commons. The commons are not community resources; the commons become a resource only when the lord or community encloses them. Enclosure transmogrifies the commons into a resource for extraction, production or circulation of commodities. Commons are as vernacular as vernacular speech. I am not suggesting that it is possible to recreate the old commons. But lacking any better analogy, I speak of the recovery of the commons to indicate how, at least conceptually, [it can be understood] ... Truly subsistence-oriented action transcends economic space, it reconstitutes the commons. This is as true for speech that recovers common language as for action which recovers commons from the environment.”

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

Illich as a historian of the premises of industrialized society

Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan:

"In his third life phase he began his sharp turn in writing towards history. He moved away from current issues and looked for the sources of our cultural assumptions in historical texts, archives, and other materials. He tried to understand where we had come from, how the very modern assumptions we lived became naturalized into unspoken and hidden (even to ourselves) certainties. For example, in Towards a History of Needs(1978), he turned towards understanding the deeper history of our cultural assumptions of actual needs and constructed needs; he traced the conversion of artificially induced desires into culturally necessary needs served by excessive consumption. How did a car become the definition of transportation? He argued consistently for a society organized around the speed of the bicycle, rather than the car. In the phenomenal book, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness(1985), he presented a history of the sacredness of water in the west, from ancient Roman fountains to the representations of water in paintings in the 19thcentury. He set out a more nuanced understanding of the history of smells, the toilet and industrial sewage systems. It is a brilliant book, bringing together the history of the toilet and the parallels between the ways in which cities developed their water systems and how we came to understand the fluid runways inside our own bodies. How did sewage and waste get to be seen in the ways that they were?

During the 1980s, Illich became a historian of ideas. I met him in 1982 in Berkeley when he taught a course on Gender based on his book of the same name. I did not think his notions of gender were as well thought as they could have been. This book was built on history of feminist thought, but it strangely undercut them, as he bluntly battled feminism and women’s increasing power as another aspect of the modern. In this argument, I could not follow him and my arguments with not just what he was saying but also the certainty with which he was saying it provoked me into intense discussions within the Illich circle of friends that Illich had come to Berkeley with. And yet, through these conversations with some of the key interlocutors, I also came to remember my paternal grandmother and the stories of my dead maternal grandmother, who were powerful in their families and households and ran them with an iron hand, with power to the point that my grandparents, father, and uncles were full of respect, awe and subservience in their presence. I had seen their gendered worlds and lived in them for months and years at a time. Sometimes I got a glimpse of Illich’s perspectives of gendered worlds, of bypassing the modern lens through which we usually look at the past as incomplete or a shadow of modernity. It sometimes made sense. Throughout the 1980s, he tried to articulate a unique perception of our industrial civilization from the view of the 12th-13thcentury in Europe. He wanted to know how we got to this point. How did we come to believe the ideas we as a culture hold close to our hearts? He was engaged in unpacking the deep assumptions with which we all live in the world, which we are mostly unaware of. He lectured widely in the 1980s and 1990s. He moved amongst three places: Cuernavaca, Mexico; Penn State University, State College, PA; and Bremen, Germany. He questioned the central assumptions of the industrialized west. He battled the rigidification of the industrialization of our certainties in these times. He argued that we as a society needed to and should exercise much more choice in our selection of what tools we use to satisfy our needs. He argued that we as a society should decide what we actually needed, rather than believing in the advertised articulation of our needs or self-serving needs of professionals who wanted us to become dependent on what they were experts of, whether it was education, medicine, technology, or energy. In this phase, he turned to the 12th-13thcentury to give himself a different vantage point to understand contemporary modern society and its underlying assumptions and beliefs. He constantly seemed to ask the vital, important question: How did we get here? If we are here, we can get out of here, by thinking and acting together to a different understanding of our actual needs. His training as a Catholic priest, I believe, gave him a strong basis of asceticism, of advocating a radical simplicity of living, of realizing how little one could actually live with and be content. He lived simply and he advocated a “liberating austerity” in order to live one’s life without imposing on the poor. His work emerged out of his theological, historical training, and his genuine curiosity of other cultural understandings of the world. He was critical of entrenched hierarchies and abuses of excessive power wherever he found them. Unfortunately, for the most part, the world is still under the spell of industrialized lifestyles which uses far more energy than needed and it is possible for all of us to have, given the excessive carbon we have released into the world. It was not that Illich or Gandhi was completely against industrialization or modernity, but rather they both thought as a society, we needed to slow down and contemplate, to discern, to figure out whether that was the best direction to go. If so, what did we actually need and how were we going to get there in terms of a fairer sense of ecology, equity, and economics that did not leave huge shadows of inaccessibility, poverty and inequality in their wakes?"

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62221/61627)

Ivan Illich

Contents

Contextual Quote

Bio

Intellectual Bio

Discussion

Ivan Illich on the Recovery of the Commons

Illich as a historian of the premises of industrialized society

More Information

Key Books to Read

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