In Memoriam - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

In Memoriam
Ivan Illich: Critic of
Professionalized Design
Carl Mitcham

Eine fremde Verlorenheit war
gestalthaft zugegen.…
— Celan, Die Niemandsrose (1963)

Ivan Illich, who inspired a critical appreciation of design and
its limits, died his own death quietly at the home of friends in
Bremen, Alemania, on December 2, 2002. Él era 76 years old, y
had suffered for more than a decade with what appeared to be a
mandibular tumor that he chose to treat as a difficult friend rather
than an enemy. He was buried three days later on the outskirts
of a city that had a tradition of independent hospitality for those
who might even be its strongest critics. For the last ten years, Illich
had lectured regularly at the Universität Bremen on such topics as
friendship, askesis, and the history of the senses, in order to question
“modern certainties.” He had been preparing a lecture on misterium
iniquitatis, the mystery of evil, when he became tired, lay down for a
nap, and did not awake again to this world. After being allowed to
remain for three days simply where he had found rest, kept company
by a single candle, a bouquet of flowers, and friends, he was buried
in the Oberneuländer cemetery.

The Early Illich
Illich was born in Vienna in 1926, grew up in Italy, moved to the
United States in the 1950s, founded the Centro Intercultural de
Documentación (CIDOC) in Mexico (1966– 1976), and since the 1980s
served as a visiting scholar at multiple universities. He remains best
known for three widely influential books from the 1970s: Deschooling
Sociedad, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical Nemesis.1 In each case, Illich
identified what he termed the phenomenon of “counterproductiv-
ity”: eso es, the pursuit of a technique beyond its inherent limits.

In the discovery of proper limits, Illich had been influenced
by studies of organic morphology and natural design such as D’Arcy
Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form,2 J.B.S. Haldane’s “On
Being the Right Size," 3 and especially Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown
of Nations.4 Indeed, Illich liked to tell of meeting Kohr quite by acci-
dent on a park bench in Puerto Rico, when both were there during
the late 1950s.

Permission granted by Catholic Agitator.

Drawing done by Gary Palmatier for the cover

of CA, 1:1 (June– July 1971).

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Nuevo

york: Harper y fila, 1971); Ivan Illich,

Tools for Conviviality (Nueva York: Harper
and Row, 1973); Ivan Illich, Medical
Nemesis (Nueva York: Pantheon, 1976).

D’Arcy W entworth Thompson’s

On Growth and Form, 2 vols. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1917).

J.B.S. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size”

in Possible Worlds and Other Essays

(Londres: Chatto and W indus, 1927),

18– 26.

Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations

(Nueva York: Rinehart, 1957).

Design Issues: Volumen 19, Número 4 Otoño 2003
Design Issues: Volumen 19, Número 4 Otoño 2003

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Kohr, a teacher of E.F. Schumacher 5 became a mentor to Illich
también, helping him to appreciate the dis-economies of scale and to
understand the manifold failures of attempts at unlimited expan-
sions across a variety of sectors. The system of public schooling,
designed originally to advance learning, had become an impediment
to real education. Advanced technological tools of transportation
and communication were at odds with autonomous human develop-
ment and the culture of friendship, in the name of which they were
commonly invented and continued to be promoted. High-tech health
care was making people sick. Iatrogenic illnesses, eso es, illnesses
caused by physicians—as when patients have negative reactions to
drogas, are harmed by diagnostic x-ray treatments, or are otherwise
mistreated and misdiagnosed—had, he argued, become a epidemic
of counterproductivity. Perhaps the most detailed analysis of coun-
terproductivity is that found in Energy and Equity 6—especially as
extended in La Trahison de l’opulence by Jean Robert and Jean-Pierre
Dupuy7—which argues that increased use of cars actually deprives
one of auto(self)-movilidad.

The correct response, for Illich, was to learn to practice a more
disciplined and limited use of technology, and to invent alternative,
especially low-scale, tecnologías. Para tal fin, Illich continuously
searched for what he called an askesis appropriate to the contempo-
rary techno-lifeworld. Often he refused to wear glasses or to speak
using a microphone. During one period, he practiced the discipline
of not word-processing any text that he had not first composed with
pen and paper. More publicly, Illich became a promotional theorist
of alternative technology, as was reflected in Valentina Borremans’s
“Guide to Convivial Tools.” 8 Illich even limed to think that he had
inadvertently contributed the Whole Earth Catalog motto, “Access to
Tools.”

In many instances, sin embargo, the practice of such a funda-
mentally ethical imperative was made more difficult than need be
by what Illich termed “radical monopolies.” Although no car manu-
facturer has a monopoly on the automobile market, cars themselves
have a fundamental monopoly on roads such that they crowd out
pedestrians and bicycles.

A Second Illich
In the late 1970s, Illich’s thinking took a new turn. His essay Toward
a History of Needs 9—a volume which reprints “Energy and Equity”—
points toward a new project in historical archeology that takes its
primero, full-bodied shape in Gender.10 Originally titled “Vernacular
Gender,” this book was among the first attempts to thematize the
distinction between biological sex and its culturally constructed
extensions in gender. The book provocatively attempted to recollect
those social experiences of female/male complementary obscured
by modern economic regimes. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness 11
explores the possibility of a history of “stuff,” thus picking up

Design Issues: Volumen 19, Número 4 Otoño 2003

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful:
Economics as if People Mattered (Nuevo

york: Harper y fila, 1973).

Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Nueva York:

Harper y fila, 1974).

Jean Robert and Jean-Pierre Dupuy,

La trahison de l’opulence (París: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1976).

Valentina Borremans, “Guide to Convivial

Tools,” Library Journal, Special Report

No.13 (Nueva York: Bowker, 1979).

Ivan Illich, Toward a History of Needs

(Nueva York: Pantheon, 1978).

Ivan Illich, Gender (Nueva York: Pantheon,

1982).

Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of
Forgetfulness (Dallas, Texas: Dallas Institute

of Humanities and Culture, 1985).

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on a phenomenology pioneered by Gaston Bachelard.12 ABC: El
Alphabet ization of the Popular Mind 13—building on the work of such
scholars as Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Eric Havelock 14—carries
historical archeology forward into the area of literacy, as does In the
Vineyard of the Text.15 Both explore how the techniques of reading
transform humans’ experience of themselves and each other, de este modo
inviting contemporary consumers of automobiles and computers to
consider that they might not be wholly unaffected users of neutral
tecnologías.

Modern technology, for Illich, emerges from and then rein-
forces a distinctive ethos, the recognition of which is best appreci-
ated by investigations into the moral environments of previous
técnicas. In this approach, there is some similarity to the attitude
of Martin Heidegger, who defended his studies of Plato with the
argument that what those who disparage as a “retreat into history”
may actually be used to cultivate a critical assessment of the contem-
porary world, which in turn enables us “to leap out beyond our
own present.” 16 But unlike Heidegger, whose philosophical history
justified a megalomaniac vision of himself as the vehicle for a new
epochal “self-assertion” of that institution known as the German
university, Illich’s history promotes the moderation and delimita-
tion of virtually all practices, but especially institutional ones. Y
de nuevo, unlike Heidegger, who seeks to understand the past better
than it understood itself, Illich tries from the perspective of the past
to re-understand the present. As he writes in the introduction to In
the Mirror of the Past:

I plead for a historical perspective on precisely those
assumptions that are accepted as verities or “practical
certainties” as long as their sociogenesis remains unexam-
ined…. [norte]ot infrequently I look at the present as if I had
to report on it to the authors of the old texts I try to under-
stand. [In each essay, Quiero] to suggest that only in the
mirror of the past does it become possible to recognize the
radical otherness of our twentieth-century mental topology,
and to become aware of its generative axioms that usually
remain below the horizon of contemporary attention.17

At his death, another major collection of materials carrying forward
this trajectory awaits publication.

Toward an Archeology of Design
In the mid-1990s, while Illich was a visiting professor at Pennsylvania
State University, he made provisional forays as well into the histori-
cal archeology of design. As a collaborator during this period, I
pushed for developing such a study in ways that would explicitly
reconnect with earlier social-critical work, and we attempted to
develop a piece with a sometimes working title of “Anti-Design:
Notes for a Manifesto on Modern and Postmodern Artifice.” The

12 Ver, p.ej., Gaston Bachelard, La psych-
analyse du feu (París: Gallimard, 1949)
and Poétique de l’espace (París: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1957).

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC:
The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind

(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988).

14 Milman Parry, Les formules et la métrique
d’Homère (París : Société d’éditions“Les

belles lettres”, 1928); Albert B. Lord,

The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MAMÁ:

Harvard University Press, 1960); and Eric

Havelock, Preface to Plato

(Cambridge, MAMÁ: Harvard University

Prensa, 1963).

Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text

(chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993).

16 Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der

Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis
und Theätet, Gesamtausgabe, volumen. 34

(Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann,

1988), 10.

Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past:
Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990

(Nueva York: Marion Boyars, 1992), 9–10.

Design Issues: Volumen 19, Número 4 Otoño 2003

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first paragraph of one version (Caer 1994) of this incomplete project
read as follows:

Contra the widely promoted belief that design is something
all human beings do and have done throughout history,
but now must do more consciously and thoroughly than
ever before, design is something that has had a history. Its
beginnings can be traced to the rise of modernity, and it will
almost certainly come to an end with the modern project.
En efecto, we have an obligation not so much to promote
designing as to learn to live without it, to resist its seduc-
ciones, and to turn away from its pervasive and corrupting
influencia.

The argument in support of this thesis was to be two-fold. En el
first instance, diseño (especially engineering, but also architectural
diseño) was not capable of achieving what it promises in the way
of and expanded control and the well-managed reduction of unin-
consecuencias tendidas. In the second, even insofar as it did achieve
such goals, design as practiced by experts and professionals ulti-
mately would dehumanize the world. The aim was to reanimate the
moral criticism of designing as a lack of proportionality in ambition
and contrivance.

One modest result of this aborted effort was the offering, en
caída de 1995, of a two-week seminar in the Architecture Department,
conducted by Illich and his long-time colleague Jean Robert. Roberto,
an architect, born in Switzerland but now a resident of Mexico, era
a tireless worker on questions of alternative technology design and
“design by people”—the latter extending the ideas of John Turner’s
Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments.18 Illich
also had been teaching a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania,
in the Graduate Program in Architecture, directed by Joseph
Rykwert, whose The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form
in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World 19 gave respect to the intuitive,
vernacular, premodern traditions of city construction. The Illich-
Robert seminar provided an critical review of developments in
design that tended to turn place and landscape into managed space,
depriving people of both roots and autonomy. What Illich had once
heard Jacques Maritain say of planning, “C’est une nouvelle espèce du
péché de présomption,” Illich and Robert applied to design. 20

An alternative, for Illich and Robert, is design in a fundamen-
tally different sense, one that did not presume to social control and
individualistic self-realization, but instead sought to promote social
solidarity, live in harmony with greater orders, and to dwell.21 Too
often design treats the world as an enemy rather than a friend, y
calls in experts to manipulate and manage. What Illich and Robert
imagined was a design based on friendship, mutual give and take,
respect for the world, and ultimately suffering, in the positive sense
of creatively accepting and affirming limitations.

Design Issues: Volumen 19, Número 4 Otoño 2003

18 John Turner, Housing by People: Towards
Autonomy in Building Environments

(Londres: Marion Boyars, 1976).

19 Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: El
Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome,
Italy and the Ancient World (Princeton,

Nueva Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976).

20 David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation

(Concord, ontario: Anansi, 1992), 62.

21 See Ivan Illich, “Dwelling” in In the

Mirror of the Past (1992), 55– 64; y
Jean Robert, Trust People (México, DF:

Habitat International Coalition, 1996).

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An Illich Community of Scholars
Illich’s thought and life have had a strong influence on a circle of
friends whose own insightful and independent work has its own
implications for design. The works of Valentina Borremans, Jean
Roberto, and Joseph Rykwert have already been mentioned. Otro
representative works from what might be called the Illich commu-
nity of reflection are, Por ejemplo, William Arney’s Experts in the
Age of Systems, 22 Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin: A
Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany and Disembodying
Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, 23 Wolfgang Sachs’s
The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, 24 David
Schwartz’s Crossing the River: Creating a Conceptual Revolution in
Community and Disability and Who Cares? Rediscovering Community, 25
Uwe Pörksen’s Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language, 26
Lee Hoinacki’s El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela and
Stumbling toward Justice: Stories of Place, 27 Madhu Suri Prakash
and Gustavo Esteva’s Escaping Education: Living as Learning within
Grassroots Cultures and Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil
of Culture.28 A younger generation of scholars strongly influenced by
Illich also shows promise for contributing to this tradition: Andoni
Alowo, Samar Farage, Silja Samerski, Sajay Samuel, and Matthias
Rieger, to mention only a few.

22 W illiam Arney, Experts in the Age of

Sistemas (Albuquerque, NM : University of

27 Lee Hoinacki, El Camino: Walking to
Santiago de Compostela (Universidad

New Mexico Press, 1991).

23 Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the
Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-
Century Germany (Cambridge, MAMÁ:

Parque, Pensilvania: Penn State Press, 1996) y

Stumbling toward Justice: Stories of
Place (University Park, Pensilvania: Penn State

Prensa, 1999).

Harvard University Press, 1991) y

28 Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva

Disembodying Women: Perspectives on
Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge,

Escaping Education: Living as Learning
within Grassroots Cultues (Londres: Zed

MAMÁ: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Books, 1998); and Gustavo Esteva and

Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-
Modernismo: Remaking the Soil of Culture

(Londres: Zed Books, 1998).

24 W olfgang Sachs, ed., The Development
Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as
Fuerza (Londres: Zed Books, 1992).
25 David Schwartz, Crossing the River:
Creating a Conceptual Revolution in
Community and Disability (Cambridge,
MAMÁ: Brookline Books, 1992) and Who
Cares? Rediscovering Community