Labors of Love — Real Life

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Author: reallifemag.com
Full Title: Labors of Love — Real Life
Category: #articles
URL: https://reallifemag.com/syllabus-for-the-internet-labors-of-love/

Highlights

The solution, expressed in report after report, lies in “future-proofing” ourselves by retraining for success in the new economy hurtling toward us. In a society like ours that conflates work with identity, the fear is not only that one’s job could become obsolete, but that one’s very self could become obsolete as well.
it is important to question the ideology of scarcity that fuels this discourse around work. We are expected to treat employment as good in itself, such that any potential job shortage is cause for distress. Meanwhile, individuals relinquish control over their own needs to paid professionals, while competing for limited positions created by the demands of the market economy.
Illich’s analysis goes to the heart of the western economic tradition, which, broadly speaking, associates scarcity with value. “The identification of that which is desirable with that which is scarce has deeply shaped our thinking, our feeling, our perception of reality itself,” he wrote in Shadow Work.
Cayley points out that means are not scarce in themselves, but only in relation to the infinite ends people devise for them. Scarcity is a consequence of limitlessness — of ambition, of desire, and even of good intentions.
According to Illich, it is only the willing acceptance of limits — a sense of enoughness — that can stop monopolistic institutions from appropriating the totality of the Earth’s available resources, including our identities, in their constant quest for growth.
Consequently, water from a river in India and water from a lake in Canada are seen today as two instances of the same thing, H2O, that in principle can be used for the same purposes as water anywhere. By erasing specificity — which encapsulates the history of each thing, its kinship with other beings, and its participation in a community that defines it according to its own cultural and social norms — the world can be reconfigured in terms of resources amenable to any and every use, and which are always in limited supply.
Illich connects the creation of scarcity and the loss of specificity to the rise of professional authority on which we have become overly reliant. Referencing Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, he observes that the diverse needs of individuals have been replaced by manufactured demand for ready-made commodities.
Formal schooling makes knowledge scarce, for example, recasting it as something that is imparted exclusively by a small number of trained educators. Likewise, the medical establishment turns health into a product that only it can provide, thereby depriving individuals of opportunities to determine their own standards of living, self-administer curative or palliative care, and construct meaning through “the art of suffering.”
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as careers have become increasingly specialized, we have ceded too many spheres of activity to experts, institutions, and markets. Illich observes that “people have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead,” but education, architecture, and the provision of care have become the near exclusive domain of professionals.
With the transition to formal employment, however, came what Illich describes as “modernized poverty.” Here, he is referring not to a lack of material wealth, but to a lack of autonomy engendered by widespread dependence on professionals.
Whereas people used to build their own homes according to their unique specifications, today such an undertaking is discouraged, or even illegal. Instead, plans are drawn up by a licensed architect, and construction carried out by a team of wage workers. “When dwelling by people is transformed into housing for people,” Illich writes, paraphrasing architect John Turner, “housing is changed from an activity into a commodity.”
employment in the formal economy can only be sustained by “shadow work,” a term Illich coined for unpaid tasks like domestic labor, grocery shopping, and car maintenance that drain people of time and energy for other pursuits.
the belief that “unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one’s neighbor” has become pervasive. In a relatively short time span, formal employment has been accepted as a precondition for usefulness, and as a result, a projected scarcity of jobs threatens individuals with obsolescence.
Trained professionals might be more efficient, employing the latest knowledge and techniques, but the very act of performing these tasks enables individuals to be active participants in private and public life.
Polanyi famously noted that as the market comes to dominate, “instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”
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We still live in what Illich calls “an age of commodity-defined needs,” and our mentality around “leisure time” continues to be defined by consumption.
The importance of limits is a key touchpoint in Illich’s thought. He identified the “vernacular” domain as fundamental to the flourishing of human autonomy. From the Latin vernaculum, meaning “homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade,” Illich took it to comprise the broad spectrum of agricultural techniques, building styles, culinary traditions, and language patterns that emerge when non-economic, non-standard modes of being are allowed to thrive. While the concept of scarcity is predicated on the concept of limitlessness — endless wants interpreted as needs — Illich understood that freedom requires limits. It is only by curtailing runaway economic and technological development that the vernacular can survive.
To truly guard ourselves against automation, perhaps the way forward is not to continually remake ourselves to meet the demands of the economy — and suffer as “failures” if we prove unable or unwilling to do so — but to reconnect with the work that truly sustains us. For this to occur, we need to make room for the vernacular, a realm within which Illich located the potential for creativity and surprise.