Technology

Conviviality and Friendship: Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry on the Virtues of Limits

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

At the start of this year, I was reading through Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text and posting a few excerpts. That book, which paid an acknowledged debt to Walter Ong, focused on developments in the evolution of the book around 1200 and subsequent consequences for literacy and society. (You can visit those posts beginning here.) Illich’s focus on literacy, however, came rather late in his career. He had earlier become well known for his writings, largely critical, on industrialized schooling. His work on schooling established a pattern of critique that he then applied to other institutions of industrial society and its tools. Illich was, by most measures, compassionately radical in his critique.

Among his works in this vein was Tools for Conviviality. Below, I’ve excerpted four paragraphs from the opening chapters of the book which give a sense of the main themes: balance, scale, and limits. Central to Illich’s critique is the notion that there are certain thresholds that, when crossed by production and institutions, result in counter-productivity. Benefits accrue on one side of the threshold, but on the other gains are outpaced by losses. Mostly these losses manifest themselves in the realms of individual self-determination and independence as well as in the social fabric of communities. In the very last line quoted, Illich gives a concise definition of what he means by conviviality.

“I here submit the concept of a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools. In each of several dimensions of this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored.

Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the slate, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose.”

And …

“It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth is balanced and kept in check by several complementary, distinct, and equally scientific modes of production. 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 useful 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.’”

Illich’s focus on scale, limits, and what he calls conviviality is a more theoretical articulation of major themes in the writing of Wendell Berry. Writing in Harper’s in 2008, just as the financial crisis was unfolding, Berry makes the following observations:

“Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. Thus an X marked on a paper ballot no longer fulfills our idea of voting. One problem with this state of affairs is that the work now most needing to be done—that of neighborliness and caretaking—cannot be done by remote control with the greatest power on the largest scale. A second problem is that the economic fantasy of limitlessness in a limited world calls fearfully into question the value of our monetary wealth, which does not reliably stand for the real wealth of land, resources, and workmanship but instead wastes and depletes it.

That human limitlessness is a fantasy means, obviously, that its life expectancy is limited. There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.

This constraint, however, is not the condemnation it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans—that is, as animals (if the word still applies) capable of living not only within natural limits but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “watershed” or “place.” But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.”

Clearly, Illich and Berry are working against the social and cultural grain. Although, recently, in certain moments, it has seemed to me that we are as a society more open to talk of limits and scale than we have ever been. This may, of course, be merely a passing phase. But perhaps not. Maybe we have passed another sort of threshold, one beyond which we begin to see the roots of our discontent. After all, if for all of our prosperity and technology, a fundamental lack still persists, then perhaps we may reconsider the foundations upon which we have staked our hopes.

In the same essay Berry writes,

In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define “freedom,” for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, “free” is etymologically related to “friend.” These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of “dear” or “beloved.” We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our “identity” is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

If, finally, a life of limits yields, among other benefits, meaningful friendships and their attendant satisfactions, then perhaps the sell may not be quite so hard as it appears.

Techne, Logos, Technology, Technique

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

In Nature, Technology and the Sacred, Bronislaw Szerszynski writes:

“Aristotle had only conjoined the words techne and logos once, and this in the Rhetoric, seeming to use the term to refer to the way that words, divorced from their, in our terms, vertical relation to universal reason, could be used solely as a means to quotidian, horizontal ends. The Greek word technologousi was used in this sense up to the twelfth century — not as craft subordinated to reason, but as reasoning subordinated to craft and artfulness. But with the Reformation, and particularly with Puritanism, came a new emphasis on reducing the arts to universal, univocal methodological principles — on finding the logos of techne itself, the science that defines all the arts, and thus overcoming the recalcitrance of matter and making it subservient to logos. Technologia, and its synonym, technometria, emerged as Latin terms in the work of the sixteenth-centruy French Protestant rhetorician Peter Ramus, who used them in the more modern sense of ‘the logos of all relations among all technai‘. But it was in the eighteenth century, for example in the work of Johann Beckamann, that the concept of technology as a ‘functional description of the process of production’ emerges in its recognizably modern sense [citing Carl Mitcham].”

Szerszynksi describes this as the “extension of logos, of speech and reason, deeper into the fabrication process, expunging the residual animism that was involved in conceiving the craftworker as having to co-operate with matter.”

Later in the same chapter, after offering a discussion of Heidegger and Foucault, Szerszynski turns to Ellul:

In The Technological System Jacques Ellul seeks to capture features of this new technological condition — both the way that technology in modern society seems to promise a this-worldly salvation by removing uncertainty from human affairs, and its distinctive, self-reproducing dynamic. He distinguishes between traditional ‘technical operations’ and the ‘technical phenomenon’, in terms of the way that the latter takes what was tentative … and ‘brings it to the realm of clear, voluntary and reasoned concepts’. The technical phenomenon (la technique) is a uniquely modern form of making and using artifacts — ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency … in every field of human activity’. He explores the way that technique resists incorporation into non-technical contexts, and becomes the measure for itself. Traditional technai were located in the context of a non-technical matrix of human ends, with accounts of human flourishing incorporating ideas of beauty, justice and contemplation. But with modern technique, the ends-context of any specific technological application is itself construed in technical terms, so that there is no non-technical context to which technology is understood as subordinate. Technique thus becomes ‘self-directing’, a closed, self-determining phenomenon. Further, technique expands, linking together different techniques in relations of mutual dependency, and absorbs non-technical activities into its orbit. Fundamentally, technique becomes an end in itself, in which elements are functional — adapted not to specific ends but to the needs of the system as a whole. Thus no individual steers the technological process; rather than individuals being the wielders and directors of technology, they are ‘responsible only for seeing that the technical act is done correctly’ [citing Robert Daly, all other quotations in paragraph from Ellul].

Here’s my summary: “Technology” brings together making and thinking. To the Greeks, making was clearly subordinate to thinking. In the early modern period, making is deeply invested with thinking. In the end, the making that emerges from the infusion of thinking is such that its emergent properties as a system triumph over thinking by binding thinking to the logic of making.

Earlier, Szersynski, following Robert W. Daly, offered the following breakdown of tool use according to Aristotle’s four causes:

“… the tool user was the ‘efficient cause’ of the final product, the resource substance used the ‘material cause’, the specific goal of the technological intervention the ‘formal cause’, and the lifeworld context within which that goal was intelligible the ‘final cause’.”

Borrowing these categories, the trajectory outlined above, and Ellul’s position, seems to be that the tool user has become the material cause and the technological system itself simultaneously the efficient, formal, and final causes. This certainly amounts to a strong technological determinism.

Oh, The Miracles You’ll See: The View from 1950

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Serendipitously, given recent topics, I came across a post at How To Be A Retronaut reproducing a 1950 article in Popular Mechanics titled, “Miracles You’ll See in the Next Fifty Years.” I’m unable to reproduce the images here, so you’ll have to click over to take a look. Here is some of what you’ll find:

In the realm of “not far off the mark if you squint,” there is the prediction that you’ll shop by a kind of television like picture-phone which also allows for business men to tele-conference. The Internet gives us something in the ballpark.

Related to the city-centered vision of the future, take a look at the images on the first couple of pages. The city’s layout itself is part of the vision. It is composed of a series of concentric rings connected by roads that slice up the city like a pizza. The inner ring is dense and urban and the outer ring is suburban and green.

Related to housework and labor saving devices, and this is really the best thing in the whole article, “Because everything in her house is waterproof, the housewife is 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose.” There was, in case you are wondering, a drain in the middle of the room. Oh, and speaking of drains, you’ll also be glad to know that plastic plates will make cleaning up a breeze since they’ll melt under hot water and just float down the drain.

Men, we can look forward to the end of shaving with a razor since we’ll be take care of our facial hair with a “chemical solution.” But you’ll get personal helicopters to make up for it.

Interestingly, while they predict that wrinkles will be merely a sign of neglect, they play it rather safe on the matter of health. The life-span will be 85, which is just about right, and cancer will not have been eradicated even though progress will have been made. They are also optimistic about the possibilities of electrical treatments to help control neurological disorders.

There is much more besides, but here is the closing:

“It is astonishing how easily the great majority of us fall into step with our neighbors. And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson’s [the fictional man of 2000], a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?”

Ah, the virtues of standardization.

The Future In All Its Sterile, Data-Crunching, Over-worked, Privatized Glory

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

In the past few weeks I’ve written a handful of times about the 1939 World’s Fair and the techno-uptopian vision of the future that infused the major pavilions. I was impressed by the scale of the vision. Coming at the end of one of the most difficult decades in American history, the Fair managed to exude a stunning confidence in what the fusion of corporate, modernist, and technological resources would achieve in just 20 years time — 1960.

The 1939 New York Fair was followed by another New York Fair in 1964. Four years into the projected utopia, it was clear that the hopes of the 1939 Fair were dramatically unrealized. The 1964 Fair, however, still tried its hand at forecasting the future, although this time without setting a date. The famous Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World, for example, debuted at GE’s pavilion. Pivoting our focus on Disney, EPCOT Center, which is a kind of permanent World’s Fair, debuted in 1983 and with it the Horizons pavilion which also offered a vision of the future in the grand World’s Fair style. The future was still being projected in a rather big way. If you have any doubts about the impact of Horizons, do a quick search on Google to get a glimpse of the cult following the ride engendered.

All of this to ask, are there any comparable contemporary projections of the future? Well, it’s not quite comparable in terms of the experience, but with this question in mind I came across a video produced by Microsoft which presents us with a vision of the future. Take a look:

There’s some interesting stuff in there I suppose, but it certainly fails to capture the imagination, no? A bit sterile and uninviting, and apparently the future is dominated by visual displays of data. Charts, lots of charts. Granted the video is explicitly centered on the theme of productivity and it is a bit hard to cast a vision of the future based on that theme alone.

This future is also one in which our experience is even more thoroughly mediated through screens and interfaces, and one in which no one seems to speak outside the home and office. And whereas the earlier classic appeal of technology was the promise of reducing labor, it appears that now the appeal of technology is in its ability to allow us to work from anywhere and to fill every idle minute with yet more work. Productivity indeed.

Most notably, by contrast with the future visions discussed earlier, this was also a rather privatized vision of the future. There was very little, if anything at all by way of a societal vision. It’s no longer a big vision of the future that requires a panoramic diorama of the city to fully capture, in fact, the city as city is largely absent from this future. The home and the office take center stage and when there are glimpses of the city, it is only as the immediate background of the users experience of some personal technology.

I don’t go in for utopian visions, but there is something vaguely depressing about a failure to imagine a utopia that might even be remotely evocative, to say nothing of offering a substantive challenge to the status quo.

Weekend Reading, 10/29/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

We’ll start this week’s assortment of links with a quick look back at a key moment in the history of American technology:

“150 Years Ago a Primitive Internet United the USA” by John Rogers in The Sydney Morning Herald: 

Journalist revisits the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line. Easy to forget how truly revolutionary the telegraph was at the time. For the first time in history, human communication could travel faster on land than a man on a horse. By the way, keeping in mind the technology/religion theme that has been in evidence here lately, let’s not forget the first telegraphic message: “What hath God wrought?”

From the past to the future. Here are two pieces on the much hyped “Singularity.” In the first, Cory Doctorow interviews Ray Kurtzweil, Singularity’s most well-known prophet/advocate. In the second, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen explains why the Singularity is almost certainly not going to take place by 2045.

“Thought Experiments: When The Singularity Is More Than A Literary Device”

“The Singularity Isn’t Near”

From the likely or unlikely future, back to the past. Here are a couple of offerings I came across at Brainpickings. The first is a brief look at the history of books through a series of really interesting and compelling images (portraits, drawings, frescoes, etc.) and the second is a video compiling the closing segments of a series documentaries on the health of the city by renowned urbanist and critic Lewis Mumford.

“Books: A Living History”

“Lewis Mumford on the City: Rare Footage from 1936”

Finally, here is an older essay from Wendell Berry. Berry, in case you are not familiar with his work, is a poet, essayist, farmer, and advocate of the agrarian life and local communities. His insights are out of step with modern assumptions and values and do not easily fit into our narrow left/right political and social schemas, and they are all the wiser for it. Here he writes on sustaining vibrant and healthy local communities.

“Conserving Communities”

Enjoy, and have a great weekend. If you’re reading in the American North East, enjoy the early snow!