Ivan Illich in Conversation. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1993 by J. Baldwin

This book is essentially an Illich reader, in which his major ideas are brought into focus by a very astute interviewer. If you've not yet read any Illich, it's a good place to start. If you're familiar with his work, it's a good review, and a lively demonstration of the continuous refining process that makes his criticism so challenging and worthwhile. The man is not afraid to change his mind He may well change yours. --J. Baldwin

Cayley: When you say that you can't meditate on the atomic bomb without going under, what do you mean? Do we not have to acknowledge and speak about the things which actually exist in our world?

Illich: What can you say about one atomic bomb in the world except ... a shout? When I began to teach in Germany, at the time the Pershing missiles were to be stationed there, I made myself available to the young people, mostly high school students, who wanted to organize protests. And I said, we can't protest in any other way but by standing there silently. We have nothing to say on this issue. We want to testify by our horrified silence. In horrified silence, the Turkish immigrant washerwoman and the university professor can make exactly the same statement, standing next to each other. As soon as you have to explain, opposition becomes again a graded, an elite affair and becomes superficial. I do not want to take part in a conspiracy of gab about peace but claim the privilege of horrified silence, in front of certain things -- if I can make my horror visible.

It is true, water was brought rather cheaply into the house. By 1920, half of all American families had an inside toilet and shower. One usually thought that women didn't have to carry buckets of water up the street any longer. In addition, families could use more water than ever before and could be cleaner. But as Mrs. Schwartz-Cowan has shown so clearly, the amount of work women henceforth had to perform in the household in cleaning bathtubs, washing toilets and bathrooms, running the washing machine, and perhaps in going out to earn the money to buy it was much greater than women had expended on the water-related activities which were expected from them, or imposed on them, in previous societies. Which type of activity women prefer -- standing with other women at the common water supply for hours while they chat and engage in powerful gossip, or each one being locked in her own bathroom, cleaning the floor -- I leave up to them to decide.

Illich: I find it very strange to go to a tap, from which something comes out that is still called potable water but children are told, "Drink from the bottle in the icebox, don't drink that stuff from the faucet," and then to take this and baptize a child with it. That's how things are. That's what it means to live today surrounded by people baptized in that stuff. I'm not questioning baptism. I'm simply saying, Look at how humiliating it is, how horrifying it is, to live today. You will then learn how to appreciate the moments of flame and beauty.

Cayley: Are you saying, then, that when industrialization goes beyond a certain intensity, producing [H.sub.2]O, a cleaning solvent, this kind of water loses its imaginative resonance with the result that, in a certain way, a baptism can no longer take place because there's nothing to baptize with?

Illich: I'm not saying that, definitely not. I'm saying something else. Other people worry about the human organism not being able to find, sometime in the middle of the next century, any more of the appropriate kind of [H.sub.2]O to make it work. I'm talking about the deadness which sets in when people have lost the sense to imagine the substance of water, not its external appearances but the deep substance of water. That deadness might be worse for those who live on than the diseases which will set in -- the AIDS analogues which will appear because there are too many organic phosphate residues, or God knows what kinds of radiation-bearing elements in the goo which comes out of the tap. I'm speaking of the deadening of the imagination through the loss of water as a substance, as I spoke about the deadening of the imagination through the loss of the text as a reflection of our mind and its inner organization. So far, I have been able to recognize every book that was composed on a computer.

Cayley: Truly?

Illich: Yes. I remember the first time it happened to me, with Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. Somebody who was enthusiastic about it gave me that book in Berlin. I was fascinated by it, but couldn't get into it. So I asked myself, What is this? I had just heard about word processors, and I suddenly said to myself, it must be written that way, in paragraphs which didn't come out of an inner flow. It's like reorganizing a river by taking a piece of it from here and putting it somewhere else, if it seems to fit....

So I made a vow -- just as twenty years ago I made a vow not to buy a daily newspaper and have kept to it -- not to type into the computer anything, any sequence of sentences, which I had not first written out with a much newer invention, the felt-tipped pen, which is so soft that you can even write on a moving Mexican bus with it.