[[TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY — IVAN ILLICH — n_e_, 1975 — Fontana Collins — 9780006336211 — 47196ee79a74e40bf81e4b52d91289a3 — Anna’s Archive.pdf]]

p.12:

Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom. To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call ‘convivial’.

p.24:

I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

DFTP - Introduction pp.7-10:

Where did it all begin, indeed? What are the stakes? Can “they” be stopped? There are scores of answers to these questions, of course. I would like to consider two particular takes on them, far from the current limelight of critical analyses, but perhaps more radical, to end this introduction. The first, by cultural critic Ivan Illich, involves as much a theory of crisis as a transition frame- work. The second, by several Latin American and European feminists, lucidly unveils the longest historical roots of the contemporary malaise, locating patriarchy at the center of it. Besides their farsighted vision, which makes them particularly appropriate for thinking about transitions, they have the additional value of embodying a strong dissenting design imagination. Reading the feminists’ critical theory of patriarchy and Illich’s acerbic but enlightening analyses of today’s machine-centered civilization, one could reach the conclusion that indeed Ain’t no use: nobody can stop them now. Yet, at the same time, their insights about transitions to relational and convivial ways of being, knowing, and doing are concrete and real, as in many other transition narratives on which we will draw. Illich is best known for his trenchant criticism of the deleterious character of expert-based institutions, from medicine and education to energy and transportation, and of the disempowering effects of the feminization of work and the narrowing down of gender struggles to a matter of individual economic and political equality. Published in 1973, Tools for Conviviality summarized many of his critiques, setting them in the context of a political vision, namely, the reconstruction of convivial modes of living, or what he termed conviviality. The book was self-consciously written as “an epilogue to the industrial era,” in the conviction that “in the advanced stage of mass production, any society produces its own destruction” (2015, 7, 9).4 His key concept, that of the industrial mode of production, enabled him to conceptualize the threat to the human that arises when tools, broadly understood, reach thresholds beyond which they become irremediably damaging to people and the environment. The steady erosion of limits started in the seventeenth century with the harnessing of energy and the progressive elimination of time and space, gained force with the Industrial Revolution, and accomplished a complete restructuring of society in the twentieth century. Many technologies or “tools” based on specialized knowledge, such as medicine, energy, and education, surpassed their thresholds sometime in the early to mid- twentieth century. Once these thresholds were passed, the technologies became not only profoundly destructive in material and cultural terms but fatally disabling of personal and collective autonomy. The concentration of power, energy, and technical knowledge in bureaucracies (the State) resulted in the institutionalization of these tools and enabled a tight system of control over production and destruction. Illich referred to this process as instrumentation and showed how it systematically destroys convivial modes of living. The result was a mega-tooled society embedded in multiple complex systems that curtail people’s ability to live dignified lives. The corollary is that society has to be reinstrumentalized to satisfy the twin goals of conviviality and efficiency within a postindustrial framework. This goal requires facing head-on the threats that accelerated growth and the uncontrollable expansion of tools pose to key aspects of the human experience, including the following: humans’ historical localization in place and nature; people’s autonomy for action; human creativity, truncated by instrumentalized education, information, and the media; people’s right to an open political process; and humans’ right to community, tradition, myth, and ritual—in short, the threats to place, autonomy, knowledge, political process, and community. Anticipating degrowth debates (chapter 5), Illich spoke about the need for an agreement to end growth and development. To a world mired in ever-increasing production, while making this production seem ever easier, Illich counterposed not only the fallacy of the growth imperative, thus making its costs visible, but the cultivation of a joyful and balanced renunciation of the growth logic and the collective acceptance of limits.5 What Illich proposed was a radical inversion, away from industrial productivity and toward conviviality. “To the threat of technocratic apocalypse, I oppose the vision of a convivial society. Such a society will rest on social con- tracts that guarantee to each person the broadest and freest access to the tools of the community, on the condition of not hampering others’ equal freedom of access… . A plurality of limited tools and of convivial organizations would foster a diversity of modes of living that would acknowledge both memory and the inheritance from the past as creation” (2015, 26–28; emphasis added). This ethical position involves an alternative technical rationality; as we shall see, it lends support to the emphasis by social movements on ancestrality== as the basis for autonomy, and by transition designers on ==futurality, or the creation of futures that have a future, as a fundamental design principle. As Illich adds, convivial tools will have to be efficacious in fostering people’s creative autonomy, social equity, and well-being, including collective control over energy and work. This means that tools need to be subjected to a political process of a new kind. As science and technology create new energy sources, this control becomes all the more important. To achieve these goals, in Illich’s view, it is imperative to impose limits on the expansion of production; these limits have the potential to enable the flourishing of a different kind of autonomy and creativity. At the end of the process, there might emerge a society that values sobriety and austerity, where people relearn dependence on others instead of surrendering to an altogether powerful economic, political, and technocratic elite. The process is eminently political: Convivial reconstruction implies the dismantling of the current industrial monopoly, not the suppression of all industrial production… . A continuous pro cess of convivial reconstruction is possible on the condition that society protects the power of persons and collectivities to change and renew their lifestyles, their tools, their environments; said other wise, their power to give their reality a new face… . We are talking about a society that diversifies the modes of production. Placing limits on industrial production has for us the goal of liberating the future… . A stagnant society would be as untenable as a society of endless acceleration. In between the two, there lies the society of convivial innovation… . Threatened by the omnipotence of the tool, the survival of the species thus depends on the establishment of procedures that enable everybody to clearly distinguish between these two forms of rationalizing and using tools, thus inciting people to choose survival within freedom. (94–97)