IVAN ILLICH’S HOUR OF LEGIBILITY

Originally Published on Parallax:
https://parallax-media.eu/andrew-sweeny/ivan-illichs-hour-of-legibility

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said recently that Ivan Illich has arrived at his ‘hour of legibility.’ In other words, the radical propositions of Ilich — that we need to ‘deschool society’ for instance, or that the present medical paradigm has become a danger to people’s health, make more sense today than they did in the 1960’s when Illich was thought of a ‘the new Karl Marx’ or a maverick at the very least.

Today we can now look at Illich as a prophet as much as a philosopher — even if he himself rejected that role. Illich had an uncanny sense of what was just beyond the horizon: for example, he imagined educational ‘decentralized webs’ way back in the 1960’s. But the age of prophets was over, Illich told us; what mattered was friendship and conviviality in the present moment rather than utopian projections for the future. Sacred friendship, awareness, and intimacy was the remedy to the counter-productivity of our apocalyptic ‘age of systems’.

Illich critiqued modern institutions, which he believed were corruptions of the Christian congregation; he questioned our universal and quasi-religious belief in the ‘divine rights’ of hospitals, schools, and all modern institutions. Schools had become…