Tools for Conviviality; Illich - Equinox Publishing

Ivan Illich [+–]

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter, he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence (Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the United States, he died in 2002.

Tools for Conviviality was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this work, Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. Illich proposed that we should ‘invert the present deep structure of tools’ in order to give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.’ Tools for Conviviality attracted worldwide attention. A resume of it was published by French social philosopher Andre Gorz in Les Temps Modernes, under the title ‘Freeing the Future’. The book’s vision of tools that would be developed and maintained by a community of users had significant influence of the first developers of the personal computer, notably Lee Felsentein.

Illich wrote: ‘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 the 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.’

The conviviality for which noted social philosopher Ivan Illich is arguing is one in which the individual’s personal energies are under direct personal control and in which the use of tools irresponsibly limited. A work of seminal importance, this book claims our attention for the urgency of its appeal, the stunning clarity of its logic and the overwhelming human note that it sounds.

Introduction

I. Two Watersheds

Two Watersheds

II. Convivial Reconstruction

Convivial Reconstruction

III. The Multiple Balance

1. Biological Degradation

2. Radical Monopoly

3. Overprogramming

4. Polarization

5. Obsolescence

6. Frustration

IV. Recovery

1. The Demytholization of Science

2. The Rediscovery of Language

3. The Recovery of Legal Procedure

V. Political Inversion

1. Myths and Majorities

2. From Breakdown to Chaos

3. Insight into Crisis

4. Sudden Change

Reviews

Illich argued that we will never be an effective society until we take back control over tools and institutions that negate our own natural abilities. Illich believed that tools are intrinsic to social relationships. They should not enforce power and compulsion, but rather encourage participation, trust and sociability: “Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them, and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others.”
Design Museum

Ivan Illich is a famous and savage critic of industrial society. I am in total agreement with many of [his] wider arguments.
Times Education Supplement

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Tools for Conviviality

Ivan Illich [+–]

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