What is Convivial Culture?
“In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom.
Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the state, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose.”
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Many forces today pull human beings apart: from each other, from the environments we live in, both natural and artificial, and from ourselves. We have founded The Tacoma Institute for Convivial Culture with the intention of redirecting education towards its proper goal: not deciding who has a right to professional status, or a higher income, but stimulating thought about what we, as human beings, want to do, and how we want to live. In particular, TICC represents a cooperative effort to explore what Ivan Illich called “convivial” modes of existence: the “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment,” rather than the “conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.” Conviviality might also be described as the always-present human potential for spontaneous cooperation and improvisation. In the current climate, it might seem far-fetched to posit such a convivial human potential. But such pessimism is itself an index of a widespread amnesia about what human beings have been, and therefore about what we might still become. Our convivial potential is therefore buried deeper and deeper under the inhuman shells we don to navigate an increasingly inhospitable world. TICC responds to this with a cooperative effort to scour the cultural resources, “the experience data of humankind…the wisdom and mistakes of the ages” (Albert Murray), in order to resurface tools, vantage points, and sensibilities which might be of assistance to us in the present. By understanding, identifying and encouraging what Ivan Illich and others have called ‘convivial’ modes of existence, we hope to be able to show that the anti-convivial culture we have built can be rebuilt otherwise.