Brick by brick, stone by stone, growing ’til he’s fully grown. Funny: I passed by the library today and took out Illich’s Tools for Conviviality again. I feel a third reading coming on, and maybe this time a blog post (to one of those other blogs) about what it has to say about our predicaments.
I was thinking à propos TfC, that unlike many or most books, which provide a portrait of the world, that Illich is giving us a lens through which the world can be viewed and some hitherto unseen or barely-descried features of the world come through loud and clear.
Portrait or lens. It reminds me of the distinction I always felt aware of, even without being able to articulate it clearly, in linguistic theories of acquisition: on the one hand, the assumption that what is innate is a fully- (or largely-) formed set of linguistic structures, primitives and combinatorical rules, sequences of operations, and so on. With some variability to be worked out through exposure to the linguistic input, but pretty much all there otherwise. And on the other hand the innate component being little more than instinctual predispositions to attend to certain aspects of the input and induce structure, rules, tactics, and so on.
I don’t know why, but the former theoretical position always rubbed me the wrong way. Overloading the theory with too much of the well-defined and static just doesn’t seem like the way things really work; at least, not naturally-occurring things like states of mind or sensory/cognitive modalities. Why expect that all we need is a full-fledged picture of reality? We have reality, or at least our construction of it. Why believe that our cognitive apparatus is just a kind of internal mirror of what lies outside? It just doesn’t add up for me.
It probably has much to do with my anti-authoritarian stance. I don’t want the mind to be like a little authority inside the head, stamping reality with the seal of approval inasmuch as our perception fits the facts. That’s nowhere. There has to be enough freedom in the system consisting of out-there and in-here, enough wiggle room to make it possible for there to be variations in the way we draw up the final portrait. The lens is fairly consistent, but there are enough differences from one to the next that we all overlap to a high degree, but not perfectly.
In the same way, a portrait-book is a nice ruler. You set it beside the world, take the measurements, keep everything neat and tidy. But the lens… there the possibilities are much broader. You can look at anything through that thing and sometimes get some real surprises. Not to mention that a portrait assumes some idea of isomorphism between noumenon and phenomon. The lens aims at something like that, but acknowledges that your mileage may vary. And anyone can make their own lens and get to work on studying the world they way they want to see it. It’s much more liberating.
