Systems for Conviviality? Pt. 1

Over at a blog called Design Dialogues, a post entitled Convivial Design for the American Breakdown argues that the current worldwide economic collapse has opened the door to greater "conviviality" in industrial design. Conviviality, of course, is the term Ivan Illich coined in his book Tools for Conviviality to describe a modern but de-professionalized, non-industrial organization of society.

Today's economic crisis, the piece asserts, looks like the one that nearly 40 years ago Illich saw as both imminent and inevitable. As economic "growth grinds to a halt," Illich is quoted, "people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion."

And so, with the U.S. economy clearly in a shambles right now, writes Peter Jones of Toronto, "there is something different, something truly timely in Illich’s Convivial Tools notion. ... Let's return ... to a process of human-scale cultural design. This means for us to 'invert the present deep structure of tools' in order to 'give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.'

Alas, we see little chance of the current situation, as dire as it is, causing any such inversion or the "true flipping of consciousness" that Illich had looked forward to. "The crisis I have described as imminent is not a crisis within industrial society," he wrote in Tools, "but a crisis of the industrial mode of production itself." Sure, lots of people are starting their own businesses, some of them craft-oriented, and more people are riding bicycles, but there's no widespread disillusionment with or rejection of industrialism. Newly-minted "consultants" still make their living helping industrial corporations, there's barely any protest over the U.S. occupation of Iraq (after all, millions of non-convivial cars need fueling every day), and the debate over "universal health care" concerns only how to divvy up access to industrialized, anonymously delivered medical services, not how to dismantle that system.

Now, we're quite sympathetic to blogger Jones' hope for more conviviality, and pleased to see him bringing that still-important book to people's attention. (And like Jones, we've held on to our stack of Whole Earth Review, aka Co-Evolution Quarterly, magazines all these years.) But Jones is, we have to point out, one of any number of people we've run into who refer to Illich's notion of conviviality as especially inspiring in their work as designers of various products, urban landscapes and, especially, information systems. For the most part, these believers in conviviality are sincere, but they miss the point of Illich's argument. And more important, they are quite unaware of the radical directions that Illich took in his thinking about tools and technology after Tools appeared.

To cut to the chase: By the late 1980s, Illich concluded that after lasting some 800 years, the epoch of "tools" and instrumentality was suddenly drawing to an end. Increasingly and with unexpected rapidity, the world was coming to be perceived and conceptualized primarily in cybernetic terms - as a hierarchy of self-regulating systems, that is. Suddenly, information, feedback loops, inputs, requirements, probabilities, risk factors, and needs were the keywords of the day. And in contrast to working with traditional tools, people don't use systems. If anything, systems use people. Illich understood that once people themselves are conceived of as mere systems, struggling for survival in the larger, global "ecosystem," then people no longer exist. And without people, or humans, in the traditional sense, there can be no "convivial" tools. And there certainly are no convivial systems.




Illich originally defined the term "tool" fairly broadly, including everything from hammers and radios to wheelbarrows and cars to hospitals and schools. The problem was that that in their modern form, many of these tools had become either overly professionalized, thus making them scarce and unavailable to the majority of people, or so over-powered as unavoidably to infringe on the commons and on the freedom and autonomy of others. Most medicines, for instance, were administrable only by highly-trained doctors. Some were quite dangerous, but mostly this restriction stemmed from doctors having erected a set of self-serving laws and regulations that kept those substances - and similarly, most medical procedures - out of the hands of non-doctors. The automobile, meanwhile, tended to exacerbate inequality, rearrange the landscape, pollute the air and ground, and deny people everyday the use of streets and their legs. Convivial alternatives would be teaching paramedics, or perhaps even everyone, how to use certain medicines and procedures, and the bicycle as the main form of transportation. Schools could be convivial tools, too, noted Illich, perhaps their most stinging critic, as long as attendance was not made not compulsory.

Like virtually all thinkers of the time, Illich conceived of tools as being quite distinct from the person wishing to use them. Traditionally, a person can pick up their choice of tool, use it in some way, and then put it down. Illich coined the neologism "distality" to describe this fundamental separation of user and tool.

Systems, in contrast, do not exhibit any such distality. One cannot pick up or put down a system, whether it's a computer system or the medical system. Instead, the system incorporates, or inscribes, each person, turning her into a mere element of the larger entity. Gregory Bateson, a biologist and one of the founding fathers of cybernetics and systems theory, saw a simple but complete system in a blind man walking with his cane down a sidewalk, the three elements connected to each other materially and by informational feedback loops. The cane tapping the pavement creates sounds which the man's ears and brain analyze to determine his position and identify possible obstacles. His mind uses the sounds and echoes to control the muscles that move his feet as well as those in his arm and hand that make the cane tap the sidewalk. Likewise, Bateson said, a lumberjack swinging an ax at a tree trunk can be treated as a system.


It was in his continuing examination of the "medical system" that Illich became aware of how the systems view was starting to eclipse that centered on tools. Here's how his close collaborator Barbara Duden describes it:

When Ivan wrote [Medical] Nemesis in 1975, he had not yet understood [...] that importing terms plucked from information sciences and cybernetics to other disciplinary fields actually undermined his goals. The book, like some of his other early works, was full of categories taken from information technology and its systemic reference system. It was only in the late 1980s that he stopped short and began to feel uneasy about what he had written, thanks to the Greek mathematician Costas Hatzkiriaku. He convinced Ivan that concepts bound up with the computer did not work as metaphors, for their substance and form are indivisible. Using computer terms as such inevitably ends up treating the human being as a programmable component in a system, even if this was not an author’s intention. “When process becomes substance” - this would be the most fitting definition - then concepts tied to the language of programming would inform everything described in this way cybernetically. Our uniqueness as humans would essentially be “deleted.”

The two sides of this watershed can be seen in Illich's discussion of the term "needs." In Tools, he was fairly comfortable in speaking about needs. What he didn't like was that increasingly needs were defined by experts and professionals and this condemned most people to passively consuming industrially-produced goods and services that were, by definition, scarce. Yet, as a term, "needs" still retained a certain humanity, a glimmer of individuality and desire:

Individuals need tools to move and to dwell. They need remedies for their diseases and means to communicate with one another. People cannot make all these things for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which vary from culture to culture. Some people depend on the supply of food and others on the supply of ball bearings.

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

By the early 1990s, Illich could look back on needs. His chapter in The Development Dictionary (1992, edited by Wolfgang Sachs), was titled Needs but wound up its argument with language like this (p.98):

In the 1970s, experts presented themselves as servants who helped the poor become conscious of their true needs, as a Big Brother to assist them in the formulation of their claims. This dream of bleeding hearts and blue-eyed do-gooders can today be easily dismissed as the nonsense of an age already past. 'Needs', in a vastly more interdependent, complex, polluted, and crowded world, can no longer be identified and quantified, except through intense teamwork and scrutiny by systems specialists. And in this new world, the needs discourse becomes the pre-eminent device for reducing people to individual units with input requirements. [emphasis in original]

When this occurs, homo economicus is rapidly recognized as an obsolete myth - the planet can no longer afford this wasteful luxury - and replaced by homo systemicus. The needs of this latter invention metamorphose from economic wants into system requirements, these being determined by an exclusivist professional hegemony brooking no deviation whatsoever. The fact that many people today already recognize their systemic requirements principally argues the power of professional prestige and pedagogy, and the final loss of personal autonomy. ... people are turned into abstract elements of a mathematical stasis. The latest conceptualization of these abstract elements has been reached recently through the reinterpretation of the common man, who is now seen as a fragile and only provisionally functioning immune system always on the brink of breakdown. ...

to be continued ....

Deschooling and Climate Change

Without a doubt, Ivan Illich’s most widely read and influential book is Deschooling Society, published in 1970. It brought Illich to the attention of a mass audience, its handful of essays - first appearing in Saturday Review and The New York Review of Books - adding much fuel to the then-raging discussion about the “education crisis.”

Illich’s main interest was to warn so-called developing nations in Latin America and elsewhere of the troublesome myths, realities, symbolic fallout, and social effects of compulsory schooling, as evidenced in the modern, industrialized nations. Schools, he argued, tacitly trained people to be consumers and worse, to believe that the only knowledge worth having was knowledge taught by professionals. School confused means and ends and was essentially a big lottery in which everyone was forced to participate but from which only a tiny few actually benefitted. The opportunity still remained, he argued, for non-industrialized, non-consumption-intensive nations, whether run with a socialistic bent or not, to opt out and take a different route than building service-oriented economies. These nations could avoid the social inequities and tremendous costs of the industrialized model.

How Illich and Deschooling were received in Brazil, Columbia, Bolivia or Nicaragua, for instance, we can't say. We were not there and we don't read Spanish, for example. But up North, so to speak, educational activists and theorists found the book tremendously stimulating. Many educational activists relished its radical arguments. And Illich’s book was, and continues to be, a major inspiration for the homeschooling movement, as well as for the closely-related unschooling movement, despite the fact, often overlooked by those familiar only with the book's title, that it doesn’t even mention, much less endorse, either idea. Illich called for a society whose tools were such that compulsory schooling would not be necessary - convivial tools, he called them, the use of which people could learn from each other, with no need for professionals.

As we see it, the issues that Illich raised in this illuminating little book have never demanded more attention and discussion than they do right now. Compulsory schooling, in all its forms, is upon us as never before, and not simply because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), shrinking school budgets, or rising college tuitions. More troubling, by far, is the escalating intensity and broadening scope of schooling that the response to climate change engendering.

As currently formulated and described by politicians and scientists - the Al Gore crowd, we might call them - solutions to the problem of “global warming” call for people to conceive of themselves in radically new ways: less as persons who live locally and remain rooted in the soil beneath their feet and more as global citizens with global responsibilities. And it’s that change of mind and redefinition of self that will, in turn, require schooling and regimentation on an unprecedented scale. The effort will aim to “educate” not only youngsters as formal students but all persons pretty much all the time - at home, at work, at the doctor’s office, at church.

Diagramming a Beatles song

Someone has come up with a clever graphical depiction of a famous Beatles song, here.

Recalling Ivan Illich, the man

Not only was Ivan Illich a challenging thinker and illuminating critic of modern, industrialized life, he was a remarkable man who lived life, day to day, year by year, in a remarkable way. And those who knew or even met him briefly were generally impressed as much by the man himself as by his thinking.

As someone has written in an Amazon.com review, Illich was a "conscientious objector to modernism." In a joyful, even foolish way, he sought to keep alive traditions and a sense of humanity and friendship that were under constant attack from all sides - by the degradation of language, by endless schooling, by the accelerating homogenization of jobs, landscape, and culture.

He managed to walk the entire length of the Andes, for instance, and even when speaking to large audiences, he often declined to use a microphone. The one time we saw him speak - in NYC in early 1985 - he made a point of shaking hands with every person who'd come to hear him; and then, he asked us all to simply listen and converse with him, to not take notes or make recordings or treat him as anyone special.

Ordained as a priest, he became one of the Church's fiercest critics. Why did the Church contribute so much to the misguided effort to "develop" poor nations along the American model? Why did it rail so against abortion, he asked, but not against nuclear weapons? And why did the Church - more specifically, why did its head theologian, Cardinal Ratzinger, later to be named pope - rely on scientific definitions of "life" in its arguments against abortion? Illich was, of course, eventually ex-communicated.

Perhaps most famously, Illich lived for the last 20 years of his life with a disfiguring and increasingly painful tumor on the right side of his face; early on, he declined to have surgery, mainly because it might well have affected or cost him his ability to speak.

We understand that Illich wanted to be known and appreciated only for his work, not for his life, or even less for a few brief moments of celebrity. (His grave, in the shadow of a Lutheran church in Bremen, Germany, is marked by a wooden cross, not a stone.) Yet, we cannot help but wonder if an oral biography of the man might not be fitting - an effort to record people's memories of him, so to speak. So many people were touched and deeply impressed by their encounters with Illich, no matter if those encounters were momentary or lasted for many years. He was, in many ways, larger than life. And repeatedly, we've heard people who either met or worked with Illich describe him and his ways with great enthusiasm.

In this vein, we point readers to two warmly and well-written reminisces of Illich that recently have come to our attention, each recalling a remarkable vitality and joie de vivre.

A site called Philia, A Dialogue on Caring Citizenship, describes itself so:

The Philia Dialogue is a global conversation on citizenship. More specifically, it's a conversation on caring citizenship - a notion of citizenship based on contribution, participation, relationship, and a commitment to the common good.

Our inspiration for this dialogue stems from our roots in the disability community. We believe that welcoming the presence and participation of people with disabilities as well as others who have been marginalized or isolated - will revitalize our communities and strengthen our society. In fact, we believe that everyone has an important contribution to make to civic life, and that the health of our society depends on the active participation of all citizens. So we want to make sure that everyone is included in the conversation.

The site specifically mentions Illich as a major inspiration. And among its founding members is a Sam Sullivan, currently the mayor of Vancouver, who recalls spending three days in the company of Illich and his circle at the home of Jerry Brown, former governor of Calif. and the then-mayor of Oakland. One short passage:

When Ivan Illich was born the doctors believed he had a mental disability and should not
be put in school. So from a very young age he engaged in self-study. He also spoke the
many languages of his different caregivers, to the extent that he never was able to point
to one mother tongue. in both his conversation and his writing he would switch
seamlessly from one language to another. I was with him one evening when a number of
his intellectual devotees arrived from various parts of the world. They would be speaking
animatedly when someone would quote a philosopher in German. The conversation
would then switch entirely to German. When someone quoted someone else in French,
the conversation would continue in French, and then move effortlessly to Spanish. Well
into the conversation Ivan realized I was not always following when he directed a
question at me in another language. Because he knew I spoke some Chinese, and he
had once tried (and failed) to master that language, he assured me that the next we met
we would continue in Chinese!

Another recollection of Illich shows up in Ode, a magazine "about the people and ideas that are changing our world for the better." "The forgotten thinker you need to know" recalls a 2001 visit with Illich at his home in Bremen.

Illich was generous with his time, the writers recall: "While the forces of development and a certain vision of progress race forward every day, Illich showed no bitterness the day we spoke. 'I'm not stupid enough to think I can really change anything, but I can poke fun at the system.'

He admitted, though, that he does feel "heartache" for people who should know better, yet choose to stick to the beaten path. He recounted a discussion he once had with the former head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. "I explained how technology is not always the solution to poverty and injustice. That equality and freedom continue to be an illusion in a world with cars." McNamara replied: "If there weren't any airplanes, I couldn't have gone to Bangladesh last week to discuss emergency aid for a flood disaster. [Illich] asked him whether his talks were a success. 'No,' [McNamara] said, 'procedural problems stood in the way.' Shortly thereafter he broke off the discussion and left to fly his private jet to his vacation home."

Yet another personal essay about Illich, published in 2003, can be found at First Things, a journal of what - religious philosophy? Peter L. Berger, a sociologist, theologian, and co-author of a book that had a strong effect on Illich, The Social Construct of Reality, remembers working closely with Illich, even planning to write a book with him, but later finding their analyses and conclusions diverging irreconcilably. Berger notes this bit of human drama:

After the mid–1970s
our contacts became intermittent. Illich often called me from some airport,
announced that he was coming through Boston, and informed me that he would come
by the house for a short visit. One time he kept a taxi waiting outside while
we talked. Then there was the surreal episode of the migrant scarf. Illich
possessed a rare scarf, made from both llama and alpaca hair, which had been
given to him by a Peruvian philosopher. Illich called me from New York, telling
me that he had forgotten the scarf in the office of his publisher, who was
going to mail it to me; he would then pick it up on a forthcoming visit to
Boston. Illich arrived, but the scarf did not. Next, he asked me to forward it
to Atlanta where, he informed me, he spent every New Year’s Eve with the widow
of Erich Fromm (Fromm lived in Cuernavaca for a while and had become a friend).

The scarf arrived, some days after Illich’s visit, and I duly sent it on to
Atlanta. But a quick recapitulation of Illich’s itinerary made me doubt that
the scarf would reach him in Atlanta either. I then had a vision of the scarf
following Illich, from continent to continent, never reaching him—a metaphor of
unending pilgrimage. (I never did learn where the scarf ended up.)

Berger concludes:

About two years ago I received a short letter from Illich. He regretted that we had seen so little of each other in recent years and thanked me for having given him some ideas that he had not had before. It read like a goodbye letter. I knew
that he had been seriously ill, and I phoned him in Mexico. It was a brief conversation. He said that he was quite well, that he was working. Then he added: “I am ready for departure” (we spoke in German—“abreisebereit”). May his journey be full of glory.

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In the Graveyard of the Text

It's remarkable the range of present-day issues that Ivan Illich's work is able to illuminate even now, 7 years after his death and many more years after he was writing, speaking, and publishing to such acclaim. This is a function of his radical and ever-deepening analysis of modern, industrialized life and its institutions and even more, his desire to understand what it has meant to be human.

Take something as arcane as the mounting concern for the future of the book - the book as repository of knowledge, source of entertainment, centerpiece of schooling, most-respected form of expressing one's self, and product of a huge industry. Whenever we stumble onto speculation about what the effect on the book and publishing industry will be from gizmos like Amazon.com's Kindle or from Google's already-huge library of digitally scanned books, and whenever we see discussions about, say, the merits of students relying on Wikipedia instead of Britannica, we can't help but think back to In the Vineyard of the Text, a 1993 book about reading in the 12th century as well as what Illich saw as the demise of "bookish" culture - a term he borrows from George Steiner. For 800 years, Illich writes, "universal bookishness [has been] the core of western secular religion, and schooling its church." But this era is coming to an end, Illich writes:

"The book has now ceased to be the root-metaphor of the age; the screen has taken its place."


By describing in detail a momentous set of changes in the physical act of reading that took place in the 12th century, Illich shows that bookish reading had a beginning. Most people alive today have taken this kind of bookish, or scholastic reading for granted, as the only one worth doing, but Illich argues that it is but one of many possibilities, contingent on the existence of various societal forces and techniques. And what's more, because it had a beginning, this kind of reading will come to an end - an end that Illich saw coming 16 years ago and that now seems to be accelerating as bandwidth increases, screens improve, batteries last longer, and the Internet penetrates daily life more fully.

Bookish reading can now clearly be recognized as an epochal phenomenon and not as a logically necessary step in the progress toward the rational use of the alphabet; as one mode of interaction with the written page among several; as a particular vocation among many, to be cultivated by some, leaving other modes to others.

Illich is not so interested in the mechanics of reading - whether books are made from paper or silicon - as he is in the book's symbolic fallout. Bookish reading ushered into being a very new and different mental space, Illich explains, with text now disassociated, or abstracted, from its out-loud vocalization and even from a particular page or book. Reading aloud from the page gave way to silent, contemplative engagement with the text, and once the text itself was organized into paragraphs and chapters and its topics indexed according to the entirely arbitrary order of the alphabet, scholars could think about, dissect, and refer to the text and its ideas in entirely new ways. And even those who could not read books at all - for many centuries, the great majority of people - were affected by these changes. The book shaped the popular mind and people's understanding of themselves and their world. Everyone, reader or not, came to believe in the "book of life," for instance, and the modern conscience was perceived as a book that could be read by priests and perhaps re-written with sufficient effort. Illich points out, too, that the separation of words by spaces, a new device in the 12th century, coincided with early glimpses of what we now understand as the modern individual, quite separate from others.

Today, those of us living in the intensely bookish culture wrought by these changes cannot fully grasp the mental space in which our pre-bookish predecessors lived and thought. There's no way, in other words, of undoing literacy - of unlearning what it is to understand the world through and as text. Likewise, there is no way for purely oral cultures to understand our literate culture. And now, Illich sees a similarly unbridgeable chasm opening up between our book-centric culture and the future culture that will be mentally shaped by screen, network, and instant hyperlink.

Many pundits strive to extrapolate from today's hardware and networking trends to predict the shape, power, size, and price of future reading devices, and to figure out what new business models those devices might support, and to imagine what all these changes will have on learning and living and playing. Illich, however, declines to engage in any such speculation, understanding that what's more important - even if it's much less graspable - is the entirely new symbolic landscape whose construction we are witnessing.

And even before the advent of computers and TV, he notes, how Western culture has understood itself and the world is increasingly through a flood of visual means and metaphors: charts, graphs, risk profiles, hand-drawn and photographic images, comics, X-rays, and computer-simulated virtual realities, for instance. And this development, he argues, can be traced all the way back to the earliest Christians - a topic we may try to tackle in another post.

Axel Krygier

It was German Muzikmeister Uwe Schmidt's Señor Coconut persona - one of several dozen that he has invented - who led us to our current fascination with Latin electronic/dance/alternative music. And this is to say that we're particularly taken, right now, by the music of a certain multi-instrumental Argentinean named Axel Krygier. To cut to the chase, check out his MySpace page, where he has put up a wealth of good, interesting music and, especially, videos.

Sr. Coconut first hooked us on neo-Latino, or electro-Latino, several years ago with his fabulous covers of Kraftwerk's music. What Schmidt realized is that Latin music and electronic dance music share a reliance on strictly-formulated rhythmic patterns and phrases, called claves in Latin music circles. Cha-cha, mambo, son, rhumba, bossa nova - all Latin styles are structured around distinctive rhythmic patterns. Likewise, electronic dance music is composed largely of repeating loops, which often get repeated and layered on top of each other to create catchy polyrhythms and, in some cases, trance-inducing passages. So, why not apply electronic techniques to Latin claves, sequencing and layering them, too? Schmidt adds to this a variety of other moves, including lots of samples taken from old Latin dance hits and a broad and playful palette of electronic glitches - all those clicks, beeps, buzzing, and other noises that are artifacts of digital and analog circuitry but now, instead of being anathema are warmly embraced.

Axel Krygier is not strictly an electronic musician - and nor, for that matter, is Sr. Coconut, who "plays" his Mac laptop on stage with live musicians - but he is from Latin America and he does work with tango and other Latin rhythms and he indulges in a fair amount of sampling and electronic sound-making. He makes jazz-pop music, we'd call it - a smart mix of traditional and post-modern. Lots of horns and winds and upright bass and standard drums - a great sense of swing. He writes music for films. Like Schmidt and his The Roger Tubesound Ensemble, there is a solid appreciation for - and skill in - pre-electronic music. One of my most favorite pieces of his is "Echale Semilla!," a good remix of which I am glad to include, here:




I only wish I spoke Spanish, even a little, so I could understand more of and about Axel Krygier!

Literary Fun

The NY Times has a nifty blog story about its work with the Morgan Library to bring Web fans complete, high-quality access to a facsimile of the first draft of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. All 66 pages are available for browsing. The story's comments are worth a look, too.

"The Social Construction of Energy"

We're looking forward with some anticipation to the arrival in a month or two of a never-before-published essay by Ivan Illich. "The Social Construction of Energy" is appearing in a publication out of Harvard called New Geographies. Any new publication of Illich is welcome, but this one is especially so as its topic is one for which we have maintained a long fascination, ever since early 1985, when we heard Illich discuss his thoughts on the matter during a wide-ranging series of evening talks in New York.

Before Newton's radically new explanation of gravity caught on, the common explanation for why everyday objects fell to the ground when dropped from a height did not rely on professional jargon and symbols. Newton's famous apple fell from the tree branch because it was heavy and because as a piece of matter, its proper place was on the ground. This common-sense understanding of "gravity," described by Aristotle, may not lend itself to mathematical analysis or help to predict solar eclipses or land rockets on distant targets, but it was just fine for people making do in the pre-modern world.

It was decades before Newton's math-based theory of gravitational force, along with the mathematical calculus that he (and separately, Liebniz) invented to explain that force, managed to catch hold with masses of scholars. But Newton's tying of force, mass and acceleration together in his three famous laws of motion did spark a revolution in physics. And eventually, university students and then younger pupils were taught Newton's laws as "the truth," and voila - a new set of "stuffs" had been socially constructed. One of these, called "energy," grabbed scientists and later, lay people, and is now widely accepted as yet another truth.

This energy, scientists came to understand and explain to others, was an abstract stuff, quite distinct from the physical forms in which its existence was evident. Energy flowed, it could be transformed (from an object in motion to electrical and then chemical form, for instance), it could be stored and manipulated and applied to performing work, it could be spent. As abstract and mutable as it was, though, energy was measurable with increasing accuracy. And its effects and transformation could be predicted with increasing accuracy, too, thanks to ever more-sophisticated mathematical techniques.

Like gravity, energy as we now understand it simply did not exist for the pre-modern, pre-Newtonian scholar. Fires created heat, oxen pulled heavy ploughs, and the sun scorched the earth. But these phenomena were not understood as examples of some universal, abstract stuff called energy being consumed or transformed or conserved.

Eventually, of course, a whole discourse, largely mathematical - think Classical Thermodynamics - grew up around this "energy" and by now, nobody thinks much about its origins - or, more significantly, that it even has an origin and history and that it is, in fact, a social construction. Nor do we often consider how our understanding of energy is so heavily influenced by modern economics, which are underpinned by the assumption that everything of value is scarce.

Or so we understand it, having thought about Illich's talk ever since. We have no doubt that his exploration of the topic runs much broader and deeper, touching on ideas such as the history of the body, gender, and his attempt, eventually abandoned, to write a "history of scarcity." Evidently, his argument so startled and captivated us that we failed to jot down any notes while listening. We do remember, though, that he mentioned having spoken recently about this social construction to a hall full of physicists at a German university. Some had questioned him but one physicist, Illich told us, had said, "Yes, Illich really 'gets' us, he really gets what physicists do!" (I believe Illich, with some relish, recalls this German lecture and the comments it elicited in one or another book, most likely Ivan Illich in Conversation (1982).

At the time we heard him speak, Illich was carrying (and selling) photocopied galleys of a book that tackled head-on the historicity of another stuff, namely water - H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Once magical and offering the gods a source of precious memories, water has been remade into a chemical solvent for removing dirt from bodies and the city. (This book is the most poetic of Illich's works and presents a brief but wonderfully imagined history of the city and urban space.) Much of his thinking in this area, Illich told us in 1985, was influenced by Gaston Bachelard (e.g. The Poetics of Space) and by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality).

It's not too far of a stretch to see that years before, even if he did not yet speak in terms of social construction, Illich had been analyzing the creation of still other "stuffs." Beware, he seemed to say, when active verbs give way to nouns - when learning becomes "getting an education," for instance, or when walking yields to "having transportation." By definition, education, just like its close cousin knowledge, is understood to be scarce, and that assumption and maintenance of scarcity goes a long way, in Illich's book, to explaining why the world is as we now see it. Illich also dissected the "energy crisis" of the early 1970s in an essay called "Energy & Equity." By the early 1980s, though, he was interested enough in the social construction topic to hold a seminar in Mexico City; one of its participants was Wolfgang Sachs.

Details about New Geographies #2 - titled "Landscapes of Energy" and addressing "the fact that energy takes up space, and that in turn such space deserves scholarly inquiry" - are available here and here. More about the issue, from the Harvard Gazette, an in-house publication:

In 1859, the first commercial oil well was drilled near Titusville, Pa. The modern oil industry that followed quickly changed landscapes around the world.
By the 20th century, a burgeoning world of derricks, tanks, pipelines, and refineries required more roads, railways, and ship lines for distribution. Cities changed with the arrival of big oil, becoming denser and busier. With the advent of cheap cars, highways widened, clover-leafed, and spread into far suburbs.

Despite all of this change, architectural historians have not often studied the effect of oil infrastructure on landscapes. Nor have they much studied the social implications of the spaces changed by the oil energy business, from abandoned oil fields to busted boomtowns — or even the destination of oil money.

A related essay, written in 1995 by Jean Robert, one of Illich's longtime collaborators, can be found at the site of a Dutch outfit called Wise, or World Information Service on Energy ("an information and networking center for citizens and environmental organizations concerned about nuclear energy, radioactive waste, radiation, and related issues.") Robert's essay is titled "Genesis and development of a scientific fact: the case of energy." One of his footnotes quotes Illich, "I am interested in the history of 'energy' because I discover in the emergence of this notion the means by which 'nature' has been interpreted as a domain governed by the assumption of scarcity, and human beings have been redefined as nature's ever needy children. Once the universe itself is placed under the regime of scarcity, homo is no more born under the stars but under the axioms of economics."

A sharing of collectives

We've been enjoying a website called All Sorts, originally brought to our attention by one of our favorite web venues and magazines, Harper's. This self-described linguistic experiment collects newly-minted collective nouns, of the form "a gaggle of geese" and "pod of whales." Except theirs are more clever: a "seemingly empty room of ninjas," a "fixie of hipsters," and a "sneer of critics."


The public is invited to submit new such items solely via Twitter, but since we have yet to avail ourselves of that somewhat frantic messaging scheme - an error of twits? - we'll offer our own collection of collectives right here:


A whisper of gossips

A mood of cows

A freak of zoids

A roid of weightlifters

A pod of casters

A post of bloggers

A bent of bluesmen

A gross of snot

A grip of wankers

A stench of assholes

Insanity in Glasgow

A friend in the UK writes about a report making the rounds over there. Seems that the Politics Department at Glasgow University refused to publicize a talk by Prof. Noam Chomsky "on the hilarious grounds that the event was 'too political'!"