distality
Just back from a visit with rural family (no internet)… so apologies for any inconveniences. Thanks to De for modding.
Hat tip to De for this post, btw, and gratitude. De made me a gift of The Rivers North of the Future – The Testament of Ivan Illich, which I am preparing to mark up a thousand different ways, because Illich is like that.
Here’s an excerpt on “distality,” a notion that I find unusually revelatory (from an interview):
We ended our conversation with your request that I interpret that which quite commonly today is called the beginning of postmodernity. I’ve explained why I don’t want to be pulled into the discourse that goes under that title. Another way in which I can speak, as an observer and an historian, about the threshold over which many people had the sense of having passed in the early 1980′s, is to call it the end of the age of dominant instrumentality. This makes sense only when you look at the concept of instrumentum, “tool,” as an historian of ideas — something we have already discussed. Together with Professor Carl Mitcham and others, I am by now pretty certain that the idea of the tool, in the narrow sense, is something which appears only in the high European Middle Aes. Just to repeat and sum up: when Plato or Pliny talk about tools, or devices, they call them organon. The tool is an extension of the human body. In the twelfth century we notice that an increasing awareness appears, partly under Arab influence, that certain material objects can incorporate, can be given human intentions. The intention to do something can pass from the hand into the hammer. The hammer can be seen as something made for hammering, and the sword something for killing, no matter if the haqmmer is taken in hand by a craftsman, or by a litle girl, or by a mill — it’s that way that in the twelfth century they begin to speak about it. The sword can serve for killing, or for war-making, no matter if he who touches it is a n oble born to the sword or any peasant trained to the sword. I believe this distinction between tool and user is characteristic of the epoch which I claim came to an end with the 1980s. There is a distance — I use the specific term “distality” — between the hand, the operator, and the instrument that performs the task. This distality disappearas again when the hammer and the man, or the dog and the leash held by a man, are conceived as a system. You can no longer say that there is a distance between the operator and the device, because according to systems theory the operator is part of the system within which he operates.
Now, why do I begin by once more calling to your attention my reflections on the age of instrumentality and my claim that it has come to an end? With the increasing dominance of insturmentality during this 800-year period, it became certain, obvious, natural, that wherever something is achieved, it is achieved by means of an instrument. The eye is perceived as an instrument for recording what’s before me, the hand is conceived and spoken about as an instrument shaped by evolutionary development. Love is an instrument for satisfaction. Just as it becomes almost unthinkable that I should be guided by an “ought” that is not determined by some kind of norm, so it becomes unthinkable that I should prusue a goal without using an instrument for that purpose. In other terms, instrumentality implies an extraordinary intensity of purposefulness within society. And hand-in-hand with the increasing intensity of instrumentalization in Western society goes a lack of attention to what one traditionally called gratuity. Is there another word for the nonpurposeful action, which is only performed because itis beautiful, it’s good, it’s fitting, and not because it’s meant to achieve, to construct, to change, to manage? You asked me to speak about a grace-less world, and it seems to me that the traditional word for the opposite of the purposeful act is the gratuitous act… …
Glenn Lewis:
What is the meaning of grace? What was its meaning when it was first used, as opposed to what grace can be construed to mean by different peoples; from different perspectives today?
The original meaning of Grace has been changed, through time and cultures, into a multitude of new meanings. The original purpose of its use is lost or muted by ever evolving semantics. Is this an example of distality? Webster’s Dictionary gives numerous definitions of grace including; approval, favor, mercy, pardon, reprieve, privilege, charm and a sense of propriety. Therefore, anyone need only exemplify charm in order to have grace. If grace is privilege and pardon, can elite rulers give license to their minions to commit atrocities, all the while acting charming and dignified?
I believe the first definition for grace given in Webster’s dictionary is the original meaning or purpose of the word, that is: “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification b: a virtue coming from God c: a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine grace”.
Originally speaking, grace is the underserved kindness God gives to individuals he chooses. The word seems to originate some time and place(s) in Christendom (not to be confused with Christ’s professed Kingdom).
In Christendom (the whoring of religion with the political states), religion did not faithfully serve the purpose of God, as outlined by the Gospel, but rather subjected its followers to the purpose of the secular state and the whims of the ruling elite. Illich refers to Latin Christendom as a mutation from the early Christian Community which used socialism and democracy as practical tools. Christ taught his followers not to put trust in earthly rulers, but rather follow his example. Mahatma Ghandi said, “I love Christ, but I hate Christians because they don’t do as Christ did.”
Atheist will reject the relationship of God and grace, but if this is the original meaning of the word then its purpose has changed in Modern Western Civilization. Western civilization has evolved from a point in time and place, where there was culturally more God to less God and now close to the point of Godless. This will seem good to some because of the atrocities of Christendom. Christendom deserves condemnation, but individuals and organizations caring for the sick, the fatherless, the elderly and following Christ’s example can be said to have the grace of their leader.
1 January 2009, 11:47 amStan:
I think distality here refers to an epistemological shift… in this case to systems-thinking in the 1980s, a shift from the instrumental-thinking of modernity. I don’t think we can accurately conceptualize — and I doubt Illich would either — a practice of democracy or socialism in the 1st Century that corresponds to the way we see it as moderns/postmoderns. Yoder talks about the constantinianization of the church; and Illich seems to agree with Yoder that the church — as it is meant to be — is to stand apart from power (that does not mean accommodate it or ignore it, on the contrary), as a community that embodies something qualitatively different from the exousia. This community unmasks that power by denying its sovereignty.
For a number of reasons, I’d ask that we stay away from “whoring” as the metaphor for accommodation. It is a metaphor that too easily maps onto oppressive ways of thinking about women, in particular the culpability of men in every aspect of actual prostitution, from child abuse, through penury, through addiction, through pimping, through being the john or the cop.
1 January 2009, 9:31 pmDeAnander:
Illich refers to modernism/progressivism as a corruption of early Christianity, an attempt to institutionalise and enforce behaviours which to be genuine and effective should spring from our spontaneous affection for each other and a universal sense of common (mutual) responsibility… I found this challenging (as a nonbeliever in God) but difficult to dismiss; over and over we have seen the warping or failure of vital movements and impulses as they were institutionalised (the taming of feminism into “Women’s Studies” at the university level is one example which which I’m sadly familiar, but we could adduce also the reduction of radical socialist ideals into the iron bureaucracy of the FSU, or the decay of a radical anticolonialist movement/moment into swaggering warlordism). Illich argued consistently that institutionalisation (we might call it the industrialisation of human feeling and tradition) was self-defeating, on every front: medical, educational, etc. — here he argues that the institutionalisation of charity and kindness is also self-defeating in the long run.
The decay of the commons in “the West” — the waste, ineffectiveness and deliberate cruelty of many “social services” programmes administered by national governments in N Am and the UK for example — and the general problem of scale in human organisation and interaction (Dunbar) seem like further evidence that the most fundamental human patterns (caring, sharing, teaching, healing) are not well served by the “economies of scale” that offer success in the narrow and destructive fields of mining (and other extractive activities) and manufacturing. But this is of course a secular reading of Illich’s very theological argument, and hence I fear doesn’t really meet him on his own terms.
2 January 2009, 2:11 pmStan:
Be not afraid. (:
Being offended at cruelty puts you precisely alongside Illich here.
You have hit the nail squarely on the head, I think; and let me be the first to express my glee at having you back.
I was also struck by what he had to say about systems-thinking, the latest instantiation of distality. Cybernetics and the like. Who knows where this takes us, but he has made the claim (and I take Illich’s claims seriously) that the Age of Instrumentality ended in the 1980s.
His thesis on the perversion of Christianity begins with Constantinianization, which he says started before the conversion of Constantine, as church fathers** (of course) started to cozy up to the idea of cozying up to institutional power. Yoder agrees with this, and says that Christian community was originally (and still is, in spite of the Constantinian perversion) the creation of “a community of those who serve instead of ruling, who suffer instead of inflicting suffering, whose fellowship crosses social lines instead of reinforcing them.” Illich’s main biblical reference throughout the book is the parable of the Samaritan.
2 January 2009, 5:45 pmskol:
We have this exact same problem at Wikipedia: WP:Don’t stuff beans up your nose. Even if they’re good beans that belong in your nose. I’m becoming allergic to the word policy. NPOV is a “policy”, which means not only does an article have to have a Neutral Point Of View, but it needs to be explained what makes something neutral. We’re weird; why take pages to describe a four word phrase that describes itself? It’s what’s actually causing the problem… not the neutral point of view, but the policy on neutral point of view. We clueful editors call it a “massive beaning”. I believe this is near-to the same argument that Illich is making – at least in the narrow context I’m familiar with on WP – between the church as the church (like we all want it to be, because it has no choice but working) and the church as an institution (which screws up a lot of things).
I hope that made sense ^^;;
I’ve read Tools for Conviviality – I wonder where something like Wikipedia (far and away the largest single source of info used on the ‘net) and his ideas meet. I swear there’s potential.
2 January 2009, 6:35 pmDeAnander:
I am intrigued by Illich’s insistence that the parable of the Samaritan is the archetypical parable, the kernel and germ of the Christian faith or ethic… and the emphasis this places on the disregard of constructed borders. Stan knows from personal correspondence that for the last few months I have had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the civilised notion of borders (or watertight taxonomies) vs the importance of edge-dwelling and porosity in living systems.
The fantasy of non-porous borders, or “pure” categories, has had some remarkably wicked real-world effects. Strict racial classification for example, is phantasmagoric (race as an imaginary social construct), yet the taxonomies created by the social imagination have been enforced with gleeful violence and cruelty. Gender is nowhere near as watertight a taxonomy as we would like to think — AIS females, for example, occupy a place not recognised by gender dualism, and we all know from experience that there’s a continuum, not a simple two-bin system, of individual hormonal balancing acts between some theoretical perfect female and perfect male. The insistence on non-porosity in national borders leads to abominations like “security” fences, border guard towers, and (of course) outright warfare. The insistence on border enforcement (quarantine) as a response to agricultural animal and plant disease, as Albert Howard pointed out with substantiating evidence in his agrarian research, is for the most part futile. The fantasy of nonporous borders or enclosures dominates field trials of GMO crops, but as we all know after a moment’s reflection, pollen knows no borders. Modern people are obsessed with defending a fantastical non-porous border about their physical selves from “germs,” bacteria, dirt, etc; yet we are walking colonies of bacteria, maybe as much as 5% non-human by weight and (wow) more non-human than human by cell count. In our guts alone…
(something I turned up on Google Answers… try searching for ‘human body bacteria weight’)
In summary, borders or boundaries are an obsession of power and control: fencing-in, Enclosing, punishing or killing strays or intruders, defending or acquiring turf, building forts or castles. This obsession with nonporous taxonomic borders (tightly associated with a shallow reading of Darwin) fuelled the official scientific establishment’s irrational distaste for symbiology (cf the struggle by field botanists to get any recognition of the symbiotic nature of lichen, which are neither a fungus nor an algae but an entangled partnership of the two)… it also drives modern agriculture’s obsession with monoculture aka the extermination of all non-cash-crop organisms from a controlled area.
I could go on
but I think this is a bit OT and should be on some other thread.
At any rate, Illich’s reading of the Samaritan as a human being crossing artificial or fantasy borders in order to reach out in kindness to another human being in distress is a powerful and resonant one for me. Recognising the Other as the Thou (hat tip to Buber) across a culturally constructed border enforced as non-porous is not only a radical act of kindness… but a radical acknowledgement of the highly porous, entangled, entwined, fractal, connected nature of life/reality vs the simple, clean, absolutely imaginary cartoon version constructed by authoritarian fantasy.
These issues are coming more and more to the fore as e.g. environmental collapse knows no national borders. Fish, birds, weather, rivers, smog, pollen, insects move without regard to checkpoints (no matter how much paperwork and how many guns are waved) and arbitrary lines drawn on maps by robber barons divvying up the loot. Illich’s Christian stance — that there are no borders and every human being is my sister and my brother — is wholly in tune with biotic and physical reality.
2 January 2009, 10:26 pmStan:
At one point, Illich blurts out, “To hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.” His argument is simple; but he has to reiterate to break through the epistemological noise. “Progess” is a pernicious myth. Amy Laura Hall gave an excellent talk last year here on the same theme as it gets applied to single moms, who are measured now against the “progressive” notion of family… and the period in which “progressivism” promoted eugenics.
Modernism put God to death on the altar of science, then substituted the illusion that we can “build the future”… by intent. The church is to be an exemplary community, that leavens society by confrontating the spirit of concupiscience and malevolence with — as De so succintly put it — caring, sharing, teaching, healing.
Illich is concerned first and foremost with epistemology, so he focuses his discernments on the idea’s reproductive effect on “material” reality, without staking out a philosophical idealist position. He simply calls himself an “historian of ideas,” just as Hudson calls himself a “financial historian.”
Our technological “distality” is an outworking of the idea that we have that kind of control (which the evidence of history overwhelmingly says we don’t). The consequences — which Illich had observed — were not advancement along the telos of “progress,” but what he called “war on subsustence” and “modernized poverty,” the collateral damage of this whole delusion.
The Samaritan gives an example of something altogether different: “gratuity.” I-Thou with no strings attached. This story in 1st Century Palestine was a shocking, scandalous one, the elevation of Love over Law. Illich says that this distality and this unholy attachment to “progress” can be traced to the post-Constantinian criminalization of sin… another attempt to control outcomes, to “build” a future. His summary of sin, however, may surprise modern readers:
3 January 2009, 6:24 amAK:
Very interesting thread… my sympathies and solidarity to the besieged people of Gaza.
(On a brighter note, good to see De is back
Happy New Years everyone, and hope folks had a merry Christmas!
Long live Free Palestine
3 January 2009, 2:49 pmLong live Free Vermont
Michael Anderson:
As a musician, even though in order to work in this world I dwell within distinct, non-porous musical boundaries a lot of the time (and I enjoy working, even if it IS restricting at times); where borders melt and styles cross-pollinate is where what I would consider REAL progress (for lack of a better term coming to mind at present), in a medium that moves most of us on a purely emotional level, occurs. It is an ongoing journey, and we are all in different stages/places in that journey, so we get a lot of variation (a good thing!).
Getting back to Stan’s original thread on instrumentality, something you use with your hands and head to try and reach a higher state of spirituality or consciousness does indeed acquire a spirit or character of its own. This has been exploited by our commercial culture to sell stuff (instruments) so you can supposedly reach the same, already institutionalized and demarcated spot that has been created for the purpose, and also you are encouraged to associate with people who have the same instrument fetishes as you do. Perhaps some Hegelian conflict resolution going on there.
This thread fits well with Andrzej M. Lobaczewski’s contention in Political Ponerology that the merging of Christianity and Imperial Rome created, as with many other institutionalized constructs, a conception of a simplified human being, that is not real. It’s too bad that a lot of people like living simplified lives both in their intellect and spirit.
4 January 2009, 4:34 pmcharles:
Proletarian _Inter_nationalism aims for no borders ( since 1848)
The Internationale:
Arise ye children of starvation
6 January 2009, 4:29 pmArise ye wretched of the _Earth_
charles:
The advance from the Realm of Necessity to the Realm of Freedom is a politically, morally, ecologically, spiritually ,every-other-ly good notion of what we ( me and lots of others) want for humanity as a whole, the human species as a whole, All of the People on Earth, the Human Race. We can do better.
If you ditch any notion of improvement of human society in the critique of the Western concept of progress, you throw out a baby with the bathwater, bend the stick too far, go round the bend…
To declare the hell with the future makes a fetish of the present ( or the past). Care for our children, grand children, great…great grand children is care about the future. Since the first humans , the invention of human culture _was_ the living generation caring and planning for the _future_ generaations (See “anthropology”; smile) Disdain for the future, future generations, is fundamentally anti-human. Caring only about the bottom line of the next quarter, the “present”, is a bourgeois bane on society.
Planning and imagination is what separates the labor of the human from the labor of the bee or the spider.
6 January 2009, 4:45 pmWinslow:
I think Illich uses the word distality in a very specific way – which some of the comments here tend to ignore. For him, it refers to the distinctness, or separateness, of person and tool, the ability of the person to put a tool down and walk away from it, as he or she pleases. This is in contrast to the system-theoretic point of view in which, as Gregory Bateson so famously put it, a man walking a dog on a leash is part of the “system” man-leash-dog. Bateson sees it this way because the man is connected to the leash is connected to the dog is connected (back through the leash) to the man. Together, this system progresses down the street, stopping and starting under the influence of its two animal bodies interacting with each other through the leash. Bateson even sees a system in a man chopping down a tree, because there is an informational feedback loop flowing through arm, ax, tree, then, as information, back to eye, to brain, and down again to muscles in arm. Each swing of the ax is controlled and directed to its proper target by this feedback loop. In effect, the man is just another component of this system, no more or less important than the ax or tree.
23 March 2011, 12:24 amIllich is concerned with this new conception of the world – indeed, of the planet and its people – as a hierarchical set of systems because it diminishes, if not erases, the fleshy body with which he is so concerned – the body so closely related to and so glorified by the Resurrection. If we humans are merely subsystems competing for scarce resources (another keyword) within the larger bio-system known as Spaceship Earth, and if our bodies are conceived of as merely a self-regulating set of subsystems (reproductive, endocrine, respiratory, etc.), then we cease to be fully human in the sense that is so interesting to Illich. Already, he points out, it is doctors who now define and give us our bodies, telling us that their highly-technical measurements, produced with arcane instruments whose workings we cannot really understand (except in terms that the doctors also provide), are more important and more defining than what we actually feel of our bodies, in our own flesh and bones. We turn to the doctor’s chart to tell us how we feel.
Of course, for Illich, tool meant not only hammer or car or steam-shovel. A school is a tool and so is a hospital, but only when those entities are operated within certain politically-defined limits – as Illich explored so wonderfully in ‘Tools for Conviviality.’ Beyond those limits, these tools become systems, schemes from which there is no escape because they inscribe us; they insist that we redefine and rethink and re-conceive ourselves in their terms. A typewriter is a tool, I think Illich would say, but a PC, with its built-in help screens designed to educate us and make us think in terms of its very technical and arbitrary structures and language, is not. And the Internet? Three guesses.
With great intuition, Illich saw that these modern systems are about as unconvivial as could be, for they deny us some measure of humanity – and arguably a great measure – by forcing us to adapt to them, if only in adopting their metaphors and “realities.” This helps explain Illich’s anger when someone in the audience told him, “I don’t get your message, Illich, you are not communicating with me.” These are words, Illich points out, pulled directly from the cybernetic discourse, a conception of the world that sees Illich and the other person not as humans engaged in a conversation but merely as systems (aka information processors) exchanging bits of coded “information.” When two people look each other in the eye and speak to each other from their heart about things that matter to them as true friends, I think Illich was striving to say, what takes place between them is of an entirely different order than anything that information theory can possibly describe. And this is so, he would say, because of what the Gospel revealed to humanity as being possible. Hence his longstanding interest in language, Orwell, the gaze, oaths, and education and schooling – for what is compulsory schooling, as we know it, but a process by which children are taught, if only tacitly, that certain people should be listened to just because those people say so. But this is a topic for another time.
I am enjoying your thoughtful blog. It might please you that Google puts you top of the list when one searches for “distality.” So there!
Stan:
Cool. And thanks, Winston; you have made a nice summary of this idea.
Peace.
23 March 2011, 7:28 am