The International Journal of Illich Studies
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128 research outputs found
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Deschooling and the Ascendant Technosophy
Full text linkThe coronavirus pandemic represents a crisis in every sector studied by Ivan Illich. One such industry that has been utterly transformed by the new normal is education. Has the pandemic allowed for a deschooling to begin? If not, how would the failures of deschooling in a crisis like this align with Illich\u27s concessions regarding deschooling\u27s limitations? Finally, what are the consequences of this new form of education on the formal and material sense imagination of knowledge
Conviviality after Social Platforms: Toward an Amateur Way of Dealing with the Internet
Full text linkIn this essay, we discuss social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, as the main ways of socializing during the social isolation consequent to the pandemic. We offer Illich\u27s insight that contingency, as Aquinas understood, created the modern way we deal with both tools and naturalized hierarchy. In this way, Illich proposed an ontology of tools, which makes it possible to understand modern humans as power tools, on the one hand, and beings with need, on the other. This created a homo miserabilis, the iatrogenic body of modernity. As the Age of Systems appears, the iatrogenic body becomes part of the cybernetic text, turning the social platforms into the agent of the current times. In opposition to this, we propose to understand the Internet\u27s conviviality narrow possibilities as playful and amateur ways, like Agamben\u27s profanations
Ivan Illich, Thresholds, and Climate Commons
No full textThis article reviews Ivan Illich\u27s notions of thresholds and proportionality as it applies to the current climate commons crisis. It traces Ivan Illich\u27s life history, his ouevre, his intellectual formation of ideas and how critically relevant they are to the current problem of climate chaos. It argues that it is vital that Illich\u27s ideas of counterproductivity, propoortionality, and thresholds inaugurate a society-wide deep reflection on the recovery of the commons to navigate the climate crisis. It also brings in Gandhi\u27s congruence to Illich\u27s ideas, a critique of industrial modernity in its current form. 
Coronavirus and Enaction of Human-made Complexity Paradoxes
Full text linkI discuss some key characteristics of current societies as more sharply emerging during coronavirus pandemic. Going beyond the specificities of the virus, I argue that ‘human-made complexity’ represents the cultural milieu within which this pandemic is developing and focus on the technical and conceptual equipment this cultural context provides to manage extreme events, including pandemics. Without entering debates concerning whether this equipment is being properly used or not in present circumstances, I highlight how societies frame and react to systemic challenges in the light of human-made complexity and associated implications. This leads me to identify a series of key logical paradoxes that are being permanently enacted. “Managing the unexpected”, “isolating interconnection”, “rational irrationality”, “relying on invisibles” and “deadly vitality” are expressions to render the constituting antinomies. I then discuss how living within these paradoxes entails a kind of societal blindness to their inherent bipolarity and the possible generation of intolerable situations of stress and systemic crises. The final sections of the paper provide instead some food for thought on how to sidestep or escape these antinomies
Dancing in the Street: Convivial Medicine at the End of Normal
Full text linkContemporary medicine is increasing in technological prowess and as a proportion of social and economic life, as it simultaneously is seeing biological and social side effects increase. Ivan Illich presciently described contemporary medical, social, and ecological crises as “nemesis” effects, which are the adverse result of processes pursued beyond legitimate limits. Illich’s critique of tools and medicine is brought together with Gerald McKenny’s description of modern medicine’s “Baconian Project,” which in parallel describes how contemporary biomedicine’s vision is constrained to the reduction of suffering and biomedical control. Illichian “conviviality” is promoted as a response to contemporary social challenges, with specific exploration of this concept in the field of medicine. By pursuing convivial medicine, the healing professions are able to resituate medicine in pursuit an integrated vision of human flourishing in a situation of social crisis
Revisiting Tools
Full text linkThis is a short exploration into the explanatory power of Tools for Conviviality to make sense of current social and political issues
Democracy without Technocratic Constraints - A Reflection Growing Out of an Extended Conversation with Chinese and German Colleagues
Full text linkDemocracy without Technocratic Constraints -A Reflection Growing Out of an Extended Conversation with Chinese and German Colleague