Whether we are already fully in the grip of the technocapital AI singularity or not, you likely feel as though there’s not much we can do. As allies of future generations, we aren’t giving up so easily. To quote the author of Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, we “wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what our life and or children’s lives may be.”
This fear is not new. The question of technology, media, and institutions became unavoidable in the 20th Century. Yet, when we think of institutions, the most radical critiques people have encountered came from either Michel Foucault or Jürgen Habermas. These thinkers towered over the theory scene in the 1970s and 80s, as radicals took their “long march through the institutions.”
When it comes to theories of social change, the tendency is to put our hopes in leaving the existing institutions, the current order failing, or some overnight revolution to bring us salvation. Otherwise, we lean in and do the best we can with what’s afforded by the existing institutions. Reform or revolution. Nothing ever changes, so we keep putting our hopes in education. So progressives say, “If only more people had access to a better education, then that would solve the problems.” But we have not thought seriously enough about the nature of our institutions, or this thing called “education” that they offer.
The most radical critiques of schooling that teachers encounter issue from Paulo Friere, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux, but none of these ever got to the root of institutions themselves. The theorist who did this is Ivan Illich. Gaining brief stardom in the 70s, Ivan Illich was the father of the deschooling movement, inspiring hundreds of radical schools and generations of homeschooling parents. But this characterization of his work, as the anti-school guy, was his ultimate demise. For that only takes account of a surface level of his work. Illich was immediately misunderstood and quickly abandoned.
The issue goes so far beyond schools. We spend our entire lives mediated through institutions that totalize, instrumentalize, and reduce humans – all of our possibilities – to something predictable, calculable, and exchangeable, easy to control. The interests of state and capital here overlap entirely. Our desires are thus turned into commodities, and our timenergy into labor power. Illich doesn’t stop here though. For institutions are not the whole picture…
When people think of schooling today they think of studying for exams, not learning for the sake of learning. When people think of hospitals, they think of treating illnesses, not human-to-human care and well being, When people think of transportation they think of speed and efficiency not the possibility of sustained, regular, and meaningful connections. When people think of reading, they think of collecting information, not lingering with an idea.The move from schooling to schole requires serious inquiry into the conditions of possibility for this mode.
I’m calling for a sincere and earnest revival of Illich. While most introductions to Illich limit their engagement to his earlier books, a series of polemics against schooling and institutionalized consumer society, I want to go deeper and lead us to a more robust understanding of who and what a human is for Illich. With his help, we will reopen the question of what we are, what we can be, and the type of lives we are willing to give our time and energy to bring into being, if there are to be humans in the future.
The course begins June
