The Dark Mountain Blog
The Return of ‘The Vernacular’: A conversation with Sajay Samuel
posted by Dougald Hine
12th July, 2011
Sajay Samuel, The Hague, 30th June 2011
Last month, I had the privilege of spending two weeks hanging out with some of the friends and collaborators of Ivan Illich. It started with a week of conversations in Pescia, Italy, after which we travelled on to The Hague to take part in the Nature Inc? conference.
More than any other thinker, Illich’s work marks the paths which led me to Dark Mountain, and I continue to find it a rich ground from which to think about “the shadow that the future throws”, how we face that shadow honestly and what it means to live well in the face of it.
If the name of Ivan Illich is still familiar in certain circles, it is mostly for the books he wrote during the 1970s: ‘Deschooling Society’, ‘Tools for Conviviality’, ‘Medical Nemesis’. Brilliant critiques of the institutions of modern industrial society, for a time these texts gave him the status of an intellectual celebrity, not so different to that of Slavoj Zizek today.
From around 1980, for various reasons, he largely fell from public view. However, it is his writings from that period onwards which have influenced me most deeply. In those years, he turned his attention to a historical enquiry into the buried assumptions on which modern industrial societies were founded. He saw that the industrial age was coming to an end, and that in its ending, other ways of being and knowing the world might emerge from the shadows of history and play an unexpected role in the years ahead.
Before we parted company last week, I sat down with Sajay Samuel, one of the group that lived and travelled with Illich in the last decade of his life, to record a conversation about Illich’s understanding of those shadowed ways of being and knowing — what he termed “the vernacular”. Together, we do our best to tease out the difference between this Illichian attitude to the past, and the kind of romanticisation of a “golden age” for which it might be mistaken. From there, we trace the increasing relevance of his arguments, as the economic and ecological crises he anticipated become harder to ignore.
Since we met in Cuernavaca in 2007, at the gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death, I have found Sajay’s philosophical rigour a vital counterweight to my own wandering, storytelling approach to the world. I often feel like he is clearing the ground and doing the hard intellectual work which makes my own thinking and writing possible. Yet very little of his own work has made it into circulation — something I hope I can help to rectify over the next few years. As a first step towards this, it is a pleasure to be able to share our conversation, and hopefully with it a glimpse of “the cultivation of conspiracy” towards which Illich calls us:
Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.
The conversation is about fifty minutes long and we do our best to explain the specific concepts and references to Illich’s work and elsewhere as they come up. But this is also a fragment from a larger conversation, stretching over many years, to which Sajay and I are making one small contribution — and to which I hope Dark Mountain, through our publications and our gatherings, can offer some hospitality. For those new to the conversation, I have added a set of references to key passages from Illich’s work, and to other parts of that wider conversation which came to mind as we spoke.
(Apologies for a few issues with the audio quality, due to wind on the microphone.)
This audio is also available to download under a CC license from the Internet Archive.
Notes
1. The concept of ‘the vernacular’ emerges as a key term in Illich’s thinking with ‘Vernacular Values’, an essay written for Stewart Brand’s Coevolution Quarterly in 1980.
2. The ‘sliding scales’ which Sajay and I discuss — between State and Market, and between Dirty and Clean technology — correspond to a diagram in that essay, on which Illich adds a third axis, between Industrial and Vernacular modes of activity.
3. When Sajay and I talk about ‘systems administrators’, we are not singling out the community of SysAdmins who keep our electronic networks running. Rather, I introduce this as a looser term for the style of management which arises when we treat the world, or ourselves, as ‘systems’. The critique of ‘the age of systems’ emerges in Illich’s later work, and is perhaps most clearly summarised in this passage from an interview with David Cayley.
4. More generally, Cayley has played an important role in documenting the conversations and ideas of Illich and his friends. Besides the two books of interviews with Illich — Ivan Illich: In Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future — there is also an excellent radio series, ‘How to Think About Science’, several of whose contributors were part of our conversations last month.
5. Two of these programmes offer case studies in the critique of systems thinking: Dean Bavington’s work on fisheries management, and in the work of Silja Samerski and Barbara Duden on the gene in popular culture.
6. In a third programme, Sajay discusses in more detail his work on the intellectual origins of modern quantitative rationality and the loss of our senses, which we touch on in the last ten minutes of our conversation. For another route through this story, see the discussion on William Petty in my dialogue with David Abram (in Dark Mountain: Issue 2 or online as a text and as a video). Abram himself spent time living with Illich and his friends at Penn State during the 1980s.
7. We also make some connections between the Epimethean attitude of ‘walking backwards into the future’ and the return of the vernacular, something I’ve written more about in ‘Remember the Future?’ (in Dark Mountain: Issue 2 or online here).
8. For the critique of ‘the view from nowhere’, which Sajay and I touch on, check out the recording and transcript of my talk from Nature Inc?, ‘It’s wrong to wish on space hardware: The power and failure of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth mythos’. This is a theme I will be returning to in my contribution to the commemoration and reexamination of the Luddites at this year’s Dark Mountain festival. (By the way, it’s worth underlining – in the light of that talk – that Illich’s first statement on “the vernacular” was written in response to a request from Brand.)
9. Many of Illich’s later writings remain unpublished, but an online archive of them is available here, thanks to the work of David Tinapple.
10. Finally, for a broader sense of the many paths explored by what I like to think of as the Illich Conspiracy, the website Thinking After Illich gathers together the work of some of his friends and co-conspirators.
Posted by Dougald Hine on 12 July, 11
Comments: 8 comments - Read them and respond
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Dougald,
To interject a comment into a conversation I would have loved to have been in, another way to look at the problem with the DesCartean “I make there fore I know” is in the confusion caused by assuming there is an “I” there to do the making or the knowing. If we see creativity/creation as something that passes through us, in a Bohmian not a neo-mystical sense, we don’t make that mistaken equivalency. “Things” are made, but not by us. Things are known, but not by us.
Sajay’s distinction between two forms of quantitative knowledge is bouncing around in my brain!
I just wish that the most valuable conversations didn’t have the lousiest audio-quality! Can’t someone invent a way to turn it up to eleven?
Marvellous recording.
Re the ‘systems administrator and how we have to, “… de-legitimise those ways of seeing the world”. Perhaps we, all of us, encompass this spectrum of apparently opposed ‘ways of seeing’. The socio-economic system that dominates daily life, and crucially, that still ‘works’ for most people, precludes their full recognition. Or, is it that they are bifurcated into public and private life? In other words, we aren’t engaged in a battle of opposing ideologies but are preparing for a moment when many others, currently under the spell of materialism, finding that it no longer provides the promised bounty, demand answers, seek a more public “return”, to deeper questions that until that moment had been regarded as private irrelevancies.
Thanks for posting this Dougald. I listened to it last evening. I really like the concept of the vernacular, as in everything that humans always did, and have stood the test of time, and somehow stopped doing, and then that knowledge and those skills have been gradually lost as people become increasingly helpless.
You asked a lot of questions I would have asked, and his answers were very thorough. I’m going to listen again, but I think he provided some good ways to start answering all those people who accuse critics of the current system of wanting to have everyone back living in caves, where life was “nasty brutish and short”. I never know where to begin with those people. It’s like an argument from a parallel universe!
I thank you for publishing this interview with one of Illich’s collaborators. Mr. Samuel has some very interesting and important things to say. May I offer this one small criticism, however, which I hope you will accept as constructive: In this interview and in others you’ve made recorded and made available, I think you chime in with your own thoughts and riffs and tangents too often. Your guests seem to accept this with politeness, but I think you’d do them and us, the audience, a favor if you’d let them have more of their say. You obviously have thought about the issues being discussed, but your job as an interviewer is mainly to pose smart questions and get them to talk. Or so it seems to me.
In any case, keep up the good work.
This conversation put me in mind of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience: http://theotherpages.org/poems/blake02.html. The lyricism of “The Echoing Green,” in Songs of Innocence, which perfectly describes (my experience of) my childhood growing up in Cardiff, Wales, in the 70s and 80s, is, I think, quite to the point for the ideas discussed here about what constitutes the vernacular and what constitutes poverty. What is most needful to a fulfilled human existence? In a sense, where does joyful poetry prevail for the majority? Is this an apt definition of the vernacular?
In “The Echoing Green,” community, continuity, leisure, a thriving and certain greenness feature as important amenities. However, Blake sets up a dichotomy in these two mirrored collections—a before and after the fall. The partner poem, “Nurse’s Song” in Songs of Experience, is characterized by fear, lack of leisure, and suspicion. Is your own conversation guilty of partaking in the same? I did notice that this possibility is refuted, and I also noticed reference to sliding scales. But I want to know what is and isn’t enough of anything? How do we decide and what do we do about achieving this state?
I would like to better understand where things went or began to go wrong and did they go wrong globally to the same extent? When were we ok? Perhaps tracing some major systems back would help clarify this? Also, does some of the wrong partake in some of the right? That is, for example, does the development and use of technology necessitate certain losses and certain gains? Can we have gains without losses? If not, how does one decide where the appropriate balance is?
Blake does not offer any “Songs of Innocence-Experience.” Can you? As we already have technology, as education has turned into a relentless machine, as personnel departments have long since become human resources divisions, as if people were so many paperclips, etc., what is possible? What would be counted a victory?
Class and bread. The middle class or the would-be (should-be!) middle class (the real middle class not how the term is used in politics in the US presently) buy fancy! bread, but the rest buy Wonderbread. Would the rest buy the fancy bread, whether a counterfeit vernacular offering or the real thing, if they could afford it? Should they? The idea of counterfeit vernacular puts me in mind of all the clear drinks that showed up in the 90s—a way of partaking in a new-age mindset to continue peddling the same garbage. Capitalism bleached out and served back up. I remember, too, a cartoon in which a bunch of would-be revolutionaries pick each other apart—by the time they have finished no one has a stitch left on because there is something wrong with the political climate in the country where an item had been produced, something else is not vegan, etc. How should we spend our time then? What is enough?
That we are experiencing economic and ecological crises does not seem to be a matter for dispute. However, I would like a more concrete definition of these. How do these differ from earlier crises?
As a reference, my own childhood was far from wealthy but there was always enough. This was fuelled by the fact that my dad worked for British Telecom for most of his working life and my mum mostly stayed at home. The vernacular was created by that community—the ever-present pot of tea and the rugby games behind our house. My mum created it by making our clothes, shopping for fresh produce almost every day, and cooking meals from scratch. My dad grew produce in our tiny garden. Later, they were grateful for central heating, a car, double-glazing, a microwave oven, etc. In other times, my mum would have been someone’s maid. The whole neighborhood knew each other based on shared leisure time. My dad at a not very high-placed job made enough money to support four people and have a small home. Today, as a single person, I barely support myself though I work two jobs.
This life was possible in part because health care was free and a university education was means-tested for those who had attained what were then the necessary standards. I want to be sure that the thesis addresses the systems and technologies that helped make my young Echoing Green life possible. Possibly, a move in which these goods are seen as vernacular rather than commodities is what is necessary.
I wonder if there is a stronger response to charges of being a romantic? What do the discussants see as being realistic? Are there any historical incidents that offer hope in terms of reversing current processes? In addition, if the point is to recast frames, is there a way or a use for recasting what it means to be romantic?
Overall, I am not clear as to exactly how the analysis transcends a yearning for an ever-more fictive past in which the good old days always belong to the outgoing generation? I notice that this idea is refuted a couple of times, and yet I need a clearer basis for it. The Victorians did far worse than the West does now in terms of infant mortality. I admit that I do not know what the story is for other parts of the world nor whether a gain here is predicated on losses elsewhere. However, I want to know what specifically is to be valued and what not, and, what we can value of what we have now?
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Nicola – I won’t try to respond to all the good questions you’re asking here, but I will have them in mind as I go on to write and speak about this.
Toby – I appreciate that I may not have provided you with the interview you would like, but with respect I think you have misunderstood. As with the other recordings you refer to, this is not offered as an interview, but as a conversation. I know from my ongoing contact with Sajay and others that they appreciate the mutual engagement, the sharing of ideas, which these conversations represent. It’s a public moment in a larger ongoing process of thinking together. The people I record these conversations with are generally pretty responsive to email, so if you would like to set up an interview to ask your own questions of them, you should do so. But the idea that it is my “job” to do anything other than follow the flow of conversation where it goes is something you’re importing from a world of professional media production which I make no claim to be participating in. I hope that clears things up.
I loved this interview. And learned a great deal from it.
At the end, first Dougald and then Sajay speak of preparing awareness to notice, or recognize, those moments wherein a buried or forgotten element of the past begins bubbling up into the open presence of the present. This moved me, for I too find myself struggling to find a way to express this curious torsion and metamorphosis in our experience of time. And have stumbled into figures of speech that are strangely similar. That similarly suggest something rising up from below, from under the ground. As if the only way to make sense of the shift beyond linear time is to bring the Earth, in its dense physicality, into the equation, and to recall the way that water rises from those depths underfoot. (Or else, perhaps, to recall the way a new mode of reality appears first as a strange cloud on the horizon, thickening and widening as it draws closer, and finally falls upon us as rain, watering the soil for new growth). Here’s a passage from the end of a chapter in a recent book, Becoming Animal:
“Renewing oral culture is thus not at all a matter of “turning back
the clock,” but rather of stepping, now and then, out of clock time
entirely. It is not a matter of “going back” to an earlier way of life,
but of aligning ourselves with the full depth of the present,
expanding awareness beyond the gleaming veneer of our massproduced
artifacts, dropping our attention beneath the recently
sedimented strata of commercial civilization (beneath the inert,
plastic layers of tossed-out toys and discarded water bottles) to
make conscious contact with the darker humus in which our humanity
is still rooted. The soil at that depth is made of dances, and
songs, and the hushed cadence of spoken stories. By remembering
ourselves at that depth, by tapping the nutrients in that timeless
soil, we draw fresh water on up into the stems and leaves of the
open present. We re-create civilization by tapping the primordial
wellsprings of culture, replenishing the practice of wonder that lies
at the indigenous heart of all culture.”
(p. 292 of ‘Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology’)
Thanks for an interesting interview. Have you ever read “Here Now Next,” Taylor Stoehr’s work on Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy? Stoehr does a great job of showing how Goodman grounded his approach to the dilemma of “what to do” in organismic behavior in an environment. Goodman’s Empire City, also, has great advice at the end, including that there is always something practical do do, a next step.