Illich’s Institutional Spectrum
April 17, 2007
Wow, keeping up with a blog is tough. And this is only my second post. I have no shortage of ideas (so far), just a shortage of time in which to compose them into coherent pieces. All day today I’ve been struggling to piece together a piece about libraries and marketing, using Ivan Illich’s institutional spectrum as a philosophical background. I finally realized that it’s just too involved to try to write right now (and it would probably make for a very long post), so I’ve decided to write it in pieces. Here’s the first one–the philosophical backround.
Ivan Illich was an important influence in my decision to pursue a career in libraries rather than education. Illich does not actually write about libaries, or, if he does, it wasn’t his writings on libraries that made me think about working in them. It was his writing about institutions in general, and schools in particular, that has shaped my thinking about this field.
In his 1971 book Deschooling Society, Illich describes an institutional spectrum, ranging from “manipulative” institutions on the right to “convivial” institutions on the left. Manipulative institutions are those which either require or coerce membership, which exist to produce, and “tend to develop effects contrary to their aims as the scope of their operations increases.” At this end of the spectrum Illich places prisons, hospitals, law enforcement, the military, and, startlingly, schools. Conversely, convivial institutions are those which do not coerce membership, which exist to be used, and which are “institutions men use without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so.” At this end of the spectrum Illich places drinking water, parks, sidewalks, and telephone and mail systems.
The dangerous thing about the manipulative institutions, according to Illich, is that they tend to produce, above all, a demand for their services. He writes:
The manipulative institutions of the right are either socially or psychologically “addictive.” Social addiction, or escalation, consists in the tendency to prescribe increased treatment if smaller quantities have not yielded the desired results. Psychological addiction, or habituation, results when consumers become
hooked on the need for more and more of the process or product.
For this reason, he writes, manipulative institutions produce more and more of whatever their service calls for: prisons produce more criminals; hospitals produce more disease; and schools produce more uneducated people.
So where does the public library fall on this spectrum? As I said at the beginning of this post, Illich doesn’t mention libraries, at least not in Deschooling Society. But in my next post I’ll look at where I think they fall, and speculate on what I think the consequences are of some of libraries’ more agressive publicity campaigns.
April 19, 2007 at 6:11 pm
You might be interested to know that there is a book, published in 2002, a few months before Illich died, called The Challenges of Ivan Illich. It is a collection of essays by various people in his circle. One of the essays is by a librarian in Berlin who often worked with Illich, locating books and other items that he needed for his intensive historical research. She remembers, quite lovingly and with some amazement, the breadth of Illich’s familiarity with and curiousity about research materials. He was constantly telling her about books she’d never heard of, and so forth.
Worth a look, if you get a chance.
Also, I know that when he first came to America (early 1950s) and worked as a priest in an upper Manhattan parish that was experiencing an influx of Puerto Ricans, Illich saw that the church in NY – predominantly Irish – had no understanding of these foreigners from an island in the Caribbean. In response, one of the first things he did to help out was to work with the local public librarian in pulling together a collection of books in Spanish – mainly for children. This was years before the public schools had begun to respond to the new Puerto Rican population.
I look forward to reading more of your thoughts about libraries vs. schools. Fascinating topic!
Oh, I would take (small) issue with your statement that Illich saw manipulative vs. convivial institutions as the same axis as right vs. left. I think he saw the former axis as orthagonal to the latter. In other words, schooling in Cuba was just as “bad” as schooling in America.
John in NJ
April 20, 2007 at 3:11 pm
John,
Thanks so much for your comments, and thanks for taking a look at my nascent blog. It’s coming together much more slowly than I had hoped, but I hope you’ll continue to vist as it gets more robust.
I’m so glad you mentioned The Challenges of Ivan Illich. I haven’t read it, but it’s on the list. I actually just met Lee Hoinacki, one of the authors of the book, on Tuesday, and I’m working on a post about his talk.
Good point about the two axes. Illich acknowledges that his use of the terms “right” and “left” to describe his spectrum may be misunderstood. He says that he doesn’t mean the spectrum to be the same as the one used for ideological classification.
But, as you point out, it is important to make this clear when talking about his institutional spectrum. As he writes in Deschooling Society, “men of the left are not always characterized by their opposition to the manipulative institutions, which I locate to the right on the spectrum.”