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Ivan
Illich
A polymath
and polemicist, his greatest contribution was as an
archaeologist of ideas, rather than an ideologue
Andrew Todd and Franco
La Cecla
Monday December 9, 2002
The Guardian
Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the
world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast
terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic
with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on
foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a
constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.
Best known for his polemical writings against
western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily
caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the
left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20
years of his life he became an officially forgotten,
troublesome figure (like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream
America). This position obscures the true importance of his
contribution. His critique of modernity was founded on a deep
understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th
century, a critical period in church history which enlightened
all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality.
He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas,
someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer
perspective, than as an ideologue.
Illich was born in Vienna into a family with
Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. His was an errant life,
and he never found a home again after his family had to leave
Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in
Florence before reading histology and crystallography at
Florence University.
He decided to enter the priesthood and studied
theology and philosophy at the Vatican's Gregorian University
from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a priest in an Irish and
Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularising the church
through close contact with the Latino community and respect
for their traditions. He applied these same methods on a
larger scale when, in 1956, he was appointed vice-rector of
the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as
founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC)
at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research centre which
offered courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from
North America.
The radicalism of CIDOC attracted many young
North American priests, but it became a victim of its own
success in a rightwing climate, and was wound up 10 years
later by the consent of its members. (Illich said of its
director, Valentina Borremans, that "she realised that the
soul of this free, independent and powerless thinkery would
have been squashed by its rising influence... [a positive]
atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which will corrupt
it".) By this time Illich had also resigned active duty as a
priest, thereby sidestepping a potentially bitter conflict
with the conservative Vatican authorities, who now opposed
CIDOC.
Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca,
but travelled constantly from this point on. His intellectual
activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on major institutions
of the industrialised world. In seven concise, non-academic
books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971),
technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973),
energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity,
1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To
Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and
Shadow Work, 1981). He analysed the corruption of institutions
which, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their
original purpose. He observed the roots of this process in the
institutionalisation of charity in the 13th-century church (he
frequently cited the Latin maxim "corruptio optimi pessima",
the corruption of the best is the worst).
His 1982 book, Gender, argued that the
difference between feminine and masculine domains had been
sacrificed to the idea of neutral work, capitalism creating
and depending on the simplistic coupling of the male wage
labourer and the woman as mother to produce new workers.
The late 1980s and 1990s saw the flowering of
his interests. There was the historicity of materials (H2O And
The Waters of Forgetfulness, 1985), literacy (ABC, The
Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written with
Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning (In The
Vineyard Of The Text, 1993). The latter volume was, he said,
an attempt to understand the transition from the book to the
computer screen through the prism of the changes in
13th-century reading practice.
In essays, papers and through the work of his
collaborators, he addressed themes as diverse as the history
of the gaze, friendship, hospitality, bioethics, body history
(particularly with his close collaborator, the sociologist
Barbara Duden) and space.
Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to
collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a
practically non-stop educational process which was always
celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in
Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.
His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were
clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained
him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in
the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring
cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he
administered his own medication against the advice of doctors,
who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have
rendered his work impossible.
He was able to finish a history of pain which
will be published in French next year, as will his complete
works. His last wish, which was to die surrounded by close
collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning centre he
had planned in Bologna, was not realised.
· Ivan Illich, thinker, born September
4 1926; died December 2 2002
THE TIMES
December 05, 2002
Ivan Illich
Radical thinker who believed that schools were bad
for pupils but who retreated into thought at the expense of
action
Ivan Illich was one of the most radical thinkers of the late
20th century. In the 1970s, from his think-tank in Mexico, he
had a major impact on international readers, especially the
young, through his radically anti-technocratic,
anti-institutional arguments on health, education, transport
and energy. Deschooling Society (1971) argued that school
rendered people unlearned, and Medical Nemesis: The
Appropriation of Health (1975) argued that health
professionals were endangering patients’ wellbeing.
In one sense, Illich was a sociologist and political
scientist; he held a part-time post under these scholastic
rubrics at Fordham University, New York, from 1968. But he was
acutely wary of enrolment in any political movement, and he
abandoned the term “philosopher” on his passport after an Arab
threw himself at his feet, transfixed by the description.
Finally, he opted for the term “historian”. Yet the only past
era that won his prolonged attention was medieval Europe,
largely through its literature, which he believed, like his
fellow dreamer G. K. Chesterton, was the key to wisdom.
Illich dreamt of a society of freedom, equality and
fraternity, but he was not a realistic planner towards these
goals, and he gradually retreated into thought rather than
action — though a close circle of friends did take on his
mantle. On the rare occasions that he visited Britain he was
keener to engage with university professors than to travel
around investigating real social conditions.
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna. His father was a Roman
Catholic Croatian landowner, his mother a Sephardic Jew. His
grandfather raised him in Vienna. Later he gained fluency in
14 languages; yet he often stated that he had no mother
tongue. Nazism forced his family to leave Austria and he ended
his schooling in Florence.
At Florence University he researched histology and
crystallography, pursuing wider interests in psychology and
art history. He went to Rome in 1943 and began to study as a
priest at the Gregorian University, the Vatican’s agency for
higher education. Illich also obtained a doctorate in history
from the University of Salzburg.
In 1951 he was assigned to pastoral work in New York with
Puerto Ricans, to whom he became passionately committed. In
1956 he moved on, as Vice- Rector, to Puerto Rico’s Catholic
University, where he acquired an active hostility to a
“Yankee” model of religion applied to Hispanic society. That
led to a running feud with the Catholic hierarchy, especially
when he attacked a bishop who issued an interdict against
voting for a pro-birth control candidate in an election for
governor; after that clash he was recalled to New York in
1960. In 1959, aged 33, he was made a Monsignor, one of the
youngest in the world at the time.
He set off on a 3,000-mile trip by horse and foot across South
America from Santiago to Caracas, seeking out a new arena for
work. In Colombia, he managed to stop the distribution of milk
powder in famine areas by missionaries, who were aiming, as he
saw it, to win extra leverage by giving the powder to
Christians only. This hasty action led directly, he later
admitted, to the death of a dozen children, and it was to
haunt him in the following years.
In 1961 he set up the Intercultural Centre for Documentation
in Mexico City, which sought to accumulate information that
could be used by people and leaders alike, rather as Mass
Observation did in Britain, and which offered crash courses in
what later came to be called “de-Yankification” for would-be
missionaries to Latin America. Later it evolved as an outlet
for radical thinking on Latin American issues and key Western
socio-cultural problems. Its classes centred on dynamic group
therapy to excise culturally imperialist assumptions. Time
magazine noted of his style with students: “He yells at them
and lectures them, plays and prays with them, insults them and
drinks with them.”
Catholic priests and laymen often came to the centre. But
Illich ran into further trouble with the Church when he
regularly rejected many of those who had enrolled as being
unfit for an anti-American overhaul. Right-wing Catholic
groups in Mexico came to see him as a bête noire.
In June 1968 he was called to Rome for a heresy-hunting
interview on his beliefs and views. Although it did not in the
end convict him, in January 1969 the Vatican banned attendance
by priests at the centre. He leaked the details of the
investigation to The New York Times; he had been accused of a
role in the Archbishop of Guatemala’s kidnap. Two months later
he voluntarily gave up the priesthood, retaining a commitment
to celibacy.
In the centre’s role as a think-tank a key preoccupation was
education. Deschooling Society, Illich’s most famous book,
came out in 1971 and introduced his name to a wider, global
audience. Convinced that the West’s education system was
collapsing through bureaucracy, numbers and the cult of
professionalism, he argued against diplomas, certificates and
the institutionalisation of learning. “Inquiries into a man’s
learning history,” he said, “should be taboo.”
Indeed, he wanted computer networks to link givers and
receivers of knowledge and ready outlets for those who wished
to attack received ideas within the educational nexus. It was
the inefficiency of standard structures that appalled him. He
held that an adult could absorb the contents of 12 years’
schooling in one or two years.
Other books flowed from his pen through the 1970s, often after
intense think-tank sessions. Tools for Conviviality (1973)
widened the scope of his technocratic targets to include
television (for numbing conversation) and cars (for choking
cities). Energy and Equity (1974) set out the pro-bicycle
case, though Illich was often accused of hypocrisy for
travelling by jet. He was in demand across the world at
lectures and seminars, where he applied a coruscating Socratic
technique to unsettle academic assumptions.
Medical Nemesis: The Appropriation of Health (1975) argued
that the health professionals had become an active menace to
their patients, and he popularised the word “iatrogenesis” to
describe a disease induced by doctors. His remedy was that
patients, with products in their own hands made available by
the medical sector, treated themselves. The Right to Useful
Unemployment and its Professional Enemies (1975) took the
attack on to other specialist priesthoods claiming a monopoly
of knowledge in their fields. He later applied the model to
industrial designers and salesmen.
His books became progressively less alert to practical issues,
more absorbed in intellectual history, probing popular
attitudes and assumptions over time. They included ABC: The
Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind (1988) and In the Vineyard
of the Text (1993), which reflected a new focus on medieval
literature.
The Intercultural Centre for Documentation closed down in 1976
but alternative outlets emerged in German universities, where
he was highly popular. He held visiting professorships at
Kassel, Oldenburg and Marburg.
His attacks on professions, neatly paradoxical as they were,
often failed to make direct contact with life on the ground in
mass society. His acute intelligence was not in doubt,
however; on one occasion, he picked up a fluent knowledge of
modern Greek in a day from a hotel gardener.
But his realism was debatable. Most of his later life was
spent in a mud hut — aristocratically aloof, austere, absorbed
but happy, just outside Mexico City. This gave him a very odd
perspective on the real problems of the urban industrial West.
He was also a visiting professor at Penn State University and
taught in Bremen, where he died having suffered for some time
from cancer.
Ivan Illich, anti-institutional writer, was born on September
24, 1926. He died on December 2, 2002, aged 76.
LE MONDE
La mort d'Ivan Illich, penseur
rebelle
L'intellectuel autrichien est mort lundi 2 décembre
à Brême, en Allemagne, à l'âge de 76 ans. Prêtre "en congé" de
l'Eglise, il avait, dans les années 1970, proposé une critique
radicale et globale de la société industrielle, de l'école et
de la médecine.
Ivan Illich aura été, jusqu'au bout de sa vie, un intellectuel
rebelle et cohérent: souffrant depuis une dizaine d'années
d'une tumeur au cerveau, il avait choisi de ne pas suivre les
thérapies usuelles, acceptant de vivre avec une énorme
protubérance sur sa joue droite, qui sidérait ses
interlocuteurs, avant qu'ils ne retrouvent la lueur de son
regard et la vélocité de son esprit.
Provocateur, lucide, implacable critique de la société
industrielle, Ivan Illich a été, au tournant des années 1970,
le porte-parole entendu et brillant d'une critique non
marxiste des institutions qui fondent l'économie
contemporaine: l'école, la santé, le développement, la
consommation énergétique ont été les cibles d'un discours
puissant et qui a donné à l'écologie une assise théorique
solide.
Mais, depuis les années 1980, l'euphorie micro-informatique,
le renouveau du capitalisme et la reddition corps et biens de
la gauche au libéralisme ont fait oublier ce penseur exigeant.
Il est décédé lundi 2 décembre, à Brême, dans la douceur, et
en pleine possession de ses moyens intellectuels.
Ivan Illich était né le 4 septembre 1926 à Vienne. Son père
était croate catholique, sa mère juive séfarade. Il est
expulsé en 1941 en application des lois raciales nazies. Il va
alors étudier à Florence, puis entre à l'Université
grégorienne du Vatican, à Rome, pour devenir prêtre.
Polyglotte, il est un dévoreur de connaissances et d'idées. Il
est influencé par le philosophe Jacques Maritain, obtient sa
licence de théologie en 1951.
Le Vatican destinerait ce jeune prêtre brillant à sa
diplomatie, mais il préfère aller à New York où on lui confie
la paroisse d'Incarnation Church, à Manhattan, où il va
travailler de 1952 à 1956. C'est une paroisse irlandaise,
progressivement transformée par l'arrivée massive d'immigrants
portoricains. Illich y découvre le problème de l'acculturation
et déploie des talents remarquables de pédagogue et de passeur
entre les cultures américaine et hispanique. Le succès est tel
que ses supérieurs l'envoient en 1956 à l'Université
catholique de Porto Rico, où il élargit son travail
d'enseignement interculturel. En 1960, il s'oppose à son
évêque, qui appelle à ne pas voter pour un candidat gouverneur
qui prônait le contrôle des naissances, et doit quitter Porto
Rico.
Il parcourt à pied l'Amérique latine et va – selon certains –
méditer au Sahara. Il rejoint en 1961 le Cidoc (Centre
interculturel de documentation) à Cuernavaca, au Mexique. Il
va en faire un carrefour extraordinaire de discussion pour
intellectuels et étudiants d'Amérique latine, ou de jeunes
Occidentaux, souvent religieux. Cette université sans
hiérarchie et sans diplômes est aussi un terrain
d'expérimentation de ses idées. Il finit par entrer en conflit
avec l'Eglise, en critiquant l'aide apostolique des Etats-Unis
à l'Amérique latine, qu'il qualifie de "plante coloniale",
dans un article publié en janvier 1967 à New York (repris dans
Esprit en mai 1967). Il entérine la rupture début 1969, en
renonçant à l'exercice et au titre de prêtre, mais sans renier
sa foi.
Indépendant de l'institution, il va se libérer en donnant en
quelques années son œuvre bouillonnante et sulfureuse, qui
tombe à pic dans un après-Mai 68 encore baigné d'utopie: Une
société sans école, publié en France en 1971, est un succès
immédiat, tandis qu'Esprit (avec Jean-Luc Domenach) et le
Nouvel Observateur (avec Michel Bosquet, alias André Gorz)
s'attachent à populariser ses idées. Il y explique que l'école
joue comme un système d'exclusion, rejetant ceux qui n'ont pas
obtenu de diplôme, tout en monopolisant ce qui est jugé digne
du nom de "savoir" et rejetant les autres formes de
connaissance humaine.
En 1973, Energie et équité, reprise
d'articles donnés au Monde, sape
l'analyse courante de la crise de l'énergie – perçue
généralement comme un problème de ressources rares – en
montrant qu'elle renvoie à la consommation, donc aux usages,
par le développement débridé des transports. Il y établit une
équivalence originale entre temps gagné – par la rapidité – et
temps perdu – à travailler pour acquérir les moyens d'aller
vite. La même année voit paraître La Convivialité,critique
plus générale du système technique, dans la foulée d'un
Jacques Ellul dont il a découvert l'œuvre en 1965.
La Convivialité est un texte qui garde une étonnante jeunesse.
Illich y analyse la transformation de l'outil en un appareil
asservissant. Il ne critique pas la technologie, mais le
monopole qui lui est conféré et qui nuit à la liberté de
chacun de répondre à ses propres besoins. Illich décrit la
logique qui conduit la société à poursuivre une croissance
ininterrompue, acculturant les groupes et les individus, sans
répondre à la pauvreté qui, au contraire, s'y
développe."L'organisation de l'économie tout entière en vue du
mieux-être est l'obstacle majeur au bien-être", résume-t-il.
Dans la seconde moitié des années 1970, Illich poursuit son
travail en sapant l'institution médicale (avec La Némésis
médicale), les illusions du travail (Le Travail fantôme), le
concept d'environnement (H2O). Mais l'optimisme des années
1960 a disparu, et l'on oublie Illich, du moins en France. Il
travaille au Mexique, et, depuis 1990, enseigne tous les
automnes à l'université de Brême, en Allemagne. Dans le miroir
du passé, en 1994 (Descartes et Cie), donne l'image de ses
nouvelles réflexions sur l'engagement ou le langage. Mais il
saisit mal les phénomènes des années 1990 que sont Internet et
la biotechnologie.
Si les intellectuels patentés l'ont oublié, les préoccupations
de Illich continuent d'irriguer un réseau actif de critiques
du développement, dont a témoigné un colloque important à
l'Unesco en mars dernier sous le titre "Défaire le
développement, refaire le monde". Illich y était – à côté de
José Bové. Ses idées ne sont pas mortes le 2 décembre, elles
sont au contraire bien vivantes.
Hervé Kempf
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eléments bibliographiques
La Convivialité, Seuil, 1973.
Nemésis médicale, Seuil, 1975.
Dans le miroir du passé, Descartes et Cie, 1994.
Un inédit, La Perte des sens, et les œuvres complètes en deux
volumes, à paraître chez Fayard en 2003.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERBATIM
Nous publions quelques fragments de la pensée d'Ivan Illich,
extraits de La Convivialité, Le Seuil (collection "Points").
La liberté
Passé un certain seuil, l'outil, de serviteur, devient
despote. Passé un certain seuil, la société devient une école,
un hôpital, une prison. Alors commence le grand enfermement.
Il importe de repérer précisément où se trouve, pour chaque
composante de l'équilibre global, ce seuil critique. Alors il
sera possible d'articuler de façon nouvelle la triade
millénaire de l'homme, de l'outil et de la société. J'appelle
société conviviale une société où l'outil moderne est au
service de la personne intégrée à la collectivité, et non au
service d'un corps de spécialistes. Conviviale est la société
où l'homme contrôle l'outil.
L'école
La redéfinition des processus d'acquisition du savoir en
termes de scolarisation n'a pas seulement justifié l'école en
lui donnant l'apparence de la nécessité; elle a aussi créé une
nouvelle sorte de pauvres, les non-scolarisés, et une nouvelle
sorte de ségrégation sociale, la discrimination de ceux qui
manquent d'éducation par ceux qui sont fiers d'en avoir reçu.
L'individu scolarisé sait exactement à quel niveau de la
pyramide hiérarchique du savoir il s'en est tenu, et il
connaît avec précision sa distance au pinacle. Une fois qu'il
a accepté de se laisser définir d'après son degré de savoir
par une administration, il accepte sans broncher par la suite
que des bureaucrates déterminent son besoin de santé, que des
technocrates définissent son manque de mobilité. Ainsi façonné
à la mentalité du consommateur-usager, il ne peut plus voir la
perversion des moyens en fins inhérente à la structure même de
la production industrielle du nécessaire comme du luxe.
La technologie
La solution de la crise exige une radicale volte-face : ce
n'est qu'en renversant la structure profonde qui règle le
rapport de l'homme à l'outil que nous pourrons nous donner des
outils justes. L'outil juste répond à trois exigences : il est
générateur d'efficience sans dégrader l'autonomie personnelle,
il ne suscite ni esclaves ni maîtres, il élargit le rayon
d'action personnel. L'homme a besoin d'un outil avec lequel
travailler, non d'un outillage qui travaille à sa place. Il a
besoin d'une technologie qui tire le meilleur parti de
l'énergie et de l'imagination personnelles, non d'une
technologie qui l'asservisse et le programme.
La crise
Je distinguerai cinq menaces portées à la population de la
planète par le développement industriel avancé :
1. La surcroissance menace le droit de l'homme à s'enraciner
dans l'environnement avec lequel il a évolué.
2. L'industrialisation menace le droit de l'homme à
l'autonomie dans l'action.
3. La surprogrammation de l'homme en vue de son nouvel
environnement menace sa créativité.
4. La complexification des processus de production menace son
droit à la parole, c'est-à-dire à la politique.
5. Le renforcement des mécanismes d'usure menace le droit de
l'homme à sa tradition, son recours au précédent à travers le
langage, le mythe et le rituel.
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 05.12.02
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