The expression came from the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, one of the elders among our company last week, offered as an antidote to all those institutes for higher this and that: welcome to the garden of low studies. It reminds me of a passage from ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’, a talk that Ivan Illich gave in Bremen in 1996, where he looked back on the ‘thinkeries’ he had created over the decades with his friends:
Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. Therefore I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and “conditioned” air that hinders the growth of friendship.
It will be eighteen years this year since I first fell into the fellowship of the friends of Ivan Illich at a gathering in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to mark the fifth anniversary of his death. I’d just turned thirty and was in the shoestring stage of bootstrapping a start-up inspired by Deschooling Society, I’d spent most of that year sleeping on my co-founders’ sofas, and the gathering was a fortnight away when I caught wind of it, so I borrowed the cost of a flight to Mexico City from my parents and went.
Like anyone who knew me in those years, or later for that matter, my parents had heard me talk enough about Illich to know why I had to go. What I was expecting, I don’t know: it’s possible to walk into a setting that will change you, knowing the strength of the force that is pulling you there, yet hardly able to imagine what you will find, except as a blank page. At least that’s how my life seems to have gone.
One mark of how that journey to Mexico changed me: two weeks after my return, I sat down and wrote to
, responding to a post he’d published months earlier, starting the conversation that led us to .In Cuernavaca, I had been taken under the wing of several of Illich’s friends and pupils, becoming part of what is now a growing circle of those whose lives have been animated by the influence of his thinking and his way of being. It was particularly precious this year to bring my family and a couple of close friends and collaborators into the mix. As
put it at the end of the week, “This has been one of life’s very good bits.”
On Saturday afternoon, I slipped off to a quiet terrace in the grounds of the San Cerbone convent outside of Lucca, where the meeting took place, to film a video in which I tell a few stories of this gathering and my journey with the Illich friends, and try to draw out three thoughts – or habits of thought – which I owe to my involvement with his work.
As always with these In-Between Videos, the later part of the video is for those of you who want to step inside the tent and get a little closer to my work, something you can do by becoming a paid subscriber – or, if that’s not possible for you right now, then simply drop me a note and I’ll comp you a subscription for the next six months. No one has ever been turned away.
Notes
Last week’s gathering was hosted by the Thinking With Ivan Illich project, who also publish the beautiful journal, Conspiratio.
In the opening part of the video, I talk about
’s ‘Home’, which is one of my favourite songs. You can listen to it here.Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul is the book that first introduced me to Illich.
If you’re new to Illich and looking for a good way into his work, then I suggest starting with Ivan Illich In Conversation, the book which
made out of the recordings the two of them made together in 1988.As of last year, Illich’s works have passed to a new English language publisher, Equinox of Sheffield, and you will find the full catalogue of his books here. (In a rather startling synchronicity, Equinox is based in the same building where I spent a year studying journalism, shortly before I discovered Illich’s work.)
There will be more Illich-related writings and conversations in the months ahead. Meanwhile, thanks for reading, watching, sharing and supporting my work in all the ways you do.
DH
