Page 6 RAIN May 1981 the household, and the evidence of a growing monopoly of shadow work. There is no subsistence-oriented society, of which I know, in which there are human activities. Activities are either those of males or of females. Each society distributes thes~ concrete tasks in a different way. By saying this I go slightly already beyond what's in this book. You can characterize a society by describing this line which distinguishes the yang from the yin, the right hand from the left hand, men's activities from women's activities. None of this task distribution is natural-there is no activity which in some society is not attributed also to men, from labor at birth to bleeding at full moon. If this observation is correct-and I'm trying to launch research seminars in every major culture area to verify if I'm correct or not, but all my bibliographies so fa'r indicate that I'm correct-there is no such thing as a human activity known outside of industrial society; it's either male activity or female activity. One cannot really proceed without the other, therefore there is a mutual interdependence which also limits exploitation-there can be as much patriarchal repression or destruction of women as you want-there are limits baked into it through the fact that concrete tasks are distributed and women are economically just as important as men. Illich on Self-Help I am moved by concern over a trend which manifested itself during the seventies. During this time professional, economic and political interests converged on an intense expansion of the shadow economy. As ten years ago Ford, Fiat and Volkswagen financed the Club of Rome to prophesy limits to growth, so they now urge the need for self-help. I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable.... Unless we clarify the distinction between this self-help and what I shall call vernacular life, the shadow economy will become the main growth sector during the current stagflation, the "informal" sector will become the main colony which sustains a last flurry of growth. And, unless the apostles of new life styles, of decentralization and alternative technology and conscientization and liberation make this distinction explicit and practical, they will only add some color, sweetener and the taste of stagna~t ideals to an irresistibly spreading shadow economy. I found this passage from Shadow Work somewhat bewildering. We at RAIN use the term "self-help" freely as one of several catchwords to describe what it is that we do-what appropriate technology, community self-reliance, even RAIN itself, are all about. Furthermore I know that Illich thinks highly of RAIN and the kinds of projects we participate in and chronicle. I asked him to elaborate his concern with "self-help." His response: Self-help is an America~ concept, which has been adopted during Illich on RAIN I've never before been to Portland. Portland for me meant a lot for the last five or six years. It meant RAIN-because RAIN from Portland-you laugh? !-arrived in Cuernavaca, or in Germany, wherever I am, not every month, but 10 months a year. Do you know what RAIN is? You do? It is by far the most effective means of access to know what is happening out there in a new world of little islands in English-speaking societies where people unplug themselves. RAIN is a magazine which comes from Portland ... [applause] . .. For most people, I assume, RAIN magazine-I'm using RAIN magazine because it is the best which I know in the world for bibliographical comment on books and activities by which people try to in one way or another unplug themselves from consumption, by which people try to get more pleasure, peace, joy out of doing There are no human concepts. Since there are no human activities but only male activities and female activities, there are no human concepts. All this is destroyed by the coming of genderless wage lrJ and the corresponding theoretically genderless shadow work ( _.11 very differential access to desirable wage-labor for men and for women). The creation of new wage labor inevitably also generates new shadow work. New social services inevitably increase the disciplined acquiescence of clients. What is worse: shadow workers can be used to create shadow work of others. . . . Sweden might now be leading the world in the attempt to employ disciplined shadow workers (volunteers) in its social services. Now, there are two entirely differentways in which society can react in front of the decrease of available salary-mass: either by transferring unemployed males to do the same kind of work which we reserved since the 19th century for women at home-which I call shadow work-shifting the responsibility for the education of children from universities to men and women unpaid at home or we can seek ways of reconquering the vernacular domain,-which is outside of the economy, which is not shadow work. By saying this I know that I am opening a Pandora's Box as I haven't done before in my life.... the later si:x;ties and seventies in mo~t other languages. It usually has a connotation which is very clear when the term is used. It means a projection of the division of productive and consumptive activities 'into the individual. Very frequently, in German, in French, in Italian, you refer to self-help, especially when you use the English word. What is meant is that the right hand produces for the left hand, that the individual himself gets split into a producer for his own needs which he then consumes. I see the interest of the industrial nation-state in controlling the "informal" sector. And I find the word "self-help" -which until a year ago I would have gladly and innocently used, only as a positive term-in~reasingly alienated and destroyed in its usefulness for me. When the United Nations, or governments, or professional schools speak about "self-help" they increasingly speak about an activity for which people must be educated-education for selfhelp. Doctors speak about it, educators speak about it, because we conceive of self-help as a projection into the acting subject of the division between production and consumption which is characteristic for commodity-intensive societies. Self-help increasingly is interpreted as an activity by which you-individual or group-generate, produce those values which you also then consume. Self-help is therefore used to designate state-controlled, professionally guided shadow work while, as far as I know, I, and most of my friends, tried to use that term.in order to indicate the voluntary, conscious return with modern means'to subsistence activities, at least partially, in our lives. things on their own rather than consuming and then having to work to generate the funds for consumption. For most people RAIN serves as a guide how to do it. For me RAIN is a major philosophical proof. I was convinced for years that people ... would increasingly try to unplug themselves from consumption. It is only after RAIN [and after bibliographies like those of Borremans (see RAIN April '80)] that I know that there are ten thousands of activities out there, each one different. We now have a list of about 1,000 bibliographies, and each bib1iography dealing with a different aspect of alternative technology or its social implications. Now, 1,000 bibliographies which are produced in a period of only 15 years represent an extraordinary activity out there, which is not noticed inside the establishment... . -Ivan Illich, from his address to Lewis and Clark College, March 12, 1981.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz