#ivan illich

Understanding as Resistance: Against the Empire of Engineered Ignorance

The term ‘shadow work’ was coined by Ivan Illich in connection with new findings in women’s studies at the end of the 1970s. Illich included in this category all those activities needed to survive on a monetary income in a modern market society. By this, he did not mean use-value-creating subsistence activities – the material basis of which was steadily eroding in industrial society – but rather activities like shopping, queuing, waiting, comparing prices, and visits to the bank, court or other state authorities and welfare bodies. This ‘drudgery in industrial society’ is the flip side of work and of its necessary corollary, surviving on a monetary income, and is carried out predominantly (albeit not exclusively) by women. Commonly, neither the people engaged in these activities nor observers perceive this as work as such. Shadow work creates neither use value nor exchange value and thus appears to belong to a different category of human activity. Illich, however, located these activities squarely within the sphere of securing one’s survival and thus linked them intimately with paid labour.

"ILLICH: I do this in order to make these students aware that virtuous behavior today might mean something different than at any previous time in history. I live with the refusal not only to say certain things but also to use certain words or to permit certain feelings to creep into my heart. I cannot allow myself to meditate on the atomic bomb without going under. Reflection on certain things we take for granted is, in my opinion, acceptance of self-destruction, of burning out your heart. And in addition to these easy-to-speak-about things, which cannot be discussed but only exorcised — such as genetic engineering, such as the atom bomb — there are other things, other realities which, once you accept that there might be intolerable realities, come very close to these destructive devices [...]

El comportamiento maquinal de las personas encadenadas a la electrónica, constituye una degradación de su bienestar y de su dignidad que, a la larga, resulta intolerable para la mayoría. Las observaciones sobre el efecto enfermizo de los entornos programados muestran que las personas que viven en ellos se vuelven indolentes, impotentes, narcisistas y apolíticas. El proceso político se rompe porque las personas dejan de ser capaces de gobernarse a sí mismas; exigen ser gestionadas.

"A radical monopoly exists where all alternatives have been rendered either inaccessible or unimaginable. An obvious example is an environment in which one simply can't live without a car. What Illich calls 'natural competence' is ruled out. The ability to walk is of no use if your destination is on the other side of a freeway you can't get across; your skill in performing a job is of no consequence if you don't possess the required educational certificate."