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Friendship is a Commons � Dougald Hine
by an ‘unwritten law’, a fabric of interweaving customs by which different people within a community had different relationships by which it was understood that they could make use of particular areas of land for hunting and fishing, for grazing, or collecting wood or medicinal plants to meet their own needs, along with different obligations to that land. “It was an unwritten law,” Illich says, “not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.” The first thing I want to say about that complex reality is that its complexity was not a problem for people. It may have been a problem for landlords and for governments, because a way of living that is unwritten is, by definition, illegible. In Seeing Like a State,2 James C. Scott presents the story of the way in which states and other topdown systems have a problem with complex, illegible social realities, which is not necessarily a problem for the people who live within and make
their life work inside those complex, illegible social realities. Illich also frames this opposition in terms of industrial society, the industrial product ion of commodities, and something he calls ‘the vernacular’. He draws this as an axis on a graph, but an axis that is not a straight line: at one end it rises straight to a single point, but at the other it branches like a root system in a thousand directions. The industrial society is the end where it becomes a straight line: development provides us with a model by which the human needs of everyone on earth are identical, defined in the same way and to be met by deploying the same systems of flush toilets, regardless of the local context. At the other end from this homogeneous industrial society of resources and commodities, you have the proliferation of the vernacular. The vernacular corresponds to what, in a Marxian voca bulary, would be d istinguished as production for use value rather than for exchange value, but Illich’s intention
1 This article is from
Ivan Illich’s remarks at the “Asahi Symposium Science and Man — The computermanaged Society”, Tokyo, Japan, 21 March 1982. See http://www.preservenet.com/ theory/Illich/ Silence.html 2 James C. Scott,
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condi tion Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1999).