The crises continue to accumulate: the economic crisis, the ecological crisis, the social crisis, crises upon crises. But as we try to create “solutions,” we distressingly find ourselves up against a limit, discovering that the only alternatives we can imagine are merely modifications of the same. Proposed solutions to the economic crisis toss us back and forth between two immobile poles: free market or regulated market. When we face the ecological crisis, we decide between sustainable technology or unsustainable technology. Whatever our personal preference, a little to this side or a little to that side, we all unwittingly play according to the same rules, think with the same concepts, speak the same language. We have forgotten how to think the new – or the old.

Ivan Illich, priest, philosopher, and social critic, is not a figure that most would expect to read about in a Marxist magazine. But he identified this problem long ago, and argued that the only “way out” was a complete change in thinking. His suggestion, both as concept and historical fact, was the “vernacular.” We will not escape from capitalism through the rationality of the scientist of history; nor will we get any help from the standpoint of the proletariat. The firm ground of Illich’s critique was precapitalist and preindustrial life in common.

Even those who reject this position must meet its challenge. Those for whom politics is embedded in the proliferation of postmodern “lifestyles,” inflected with pseudo-Marxist jargon, will have to recognize that the only model we have of forms of life based on direct access to the means of subsistence is precisely the “vernacular” that Illich proposes. Alternatively, those who locate emancipation in a Marx-inflected narrative of technological progress must to face Illich’s deep criticisms of developmentalism, scientism, and progressivism. The following is a challenge not only to capitalism and the experts who defend it, but also to its critics.

Mind Trap 1: the economic crisis

Ignoring his own contributions to the festivities, George W. Bush recently scolded those on Wall Street for getting drunk on the profits from selling unpayable debts.¹ The resulting collapse of financial markets heralded the end of the party. The drunks seem to have sobered up without themselves suffering the consequent hangover. Instead, in the U.S. and elsewhere, a growing number of people are left stranded without homes, jobs, food, or medicines in the wake of that twenty-year long binge. In the opinion of some, the prospects of full employment or secure retirements for US citizens are a distant and unlikely dream. As recently as April 19^th 2011, The McDonald Corporation conducted a national hiring day. Almost one million people applied for those jobs, known neither for their lavish pay nor for their agreeable working conditions. McDonald’s hired a mere six percent of these applicants, as many workers in one day as the number of net new jobs in the US for all of 2009.²

Unsurprisingly, diagnoses of what went wrong have proliferated fast and furiously. Of the many explanations offered, three stand out.³ First, in a spirit of self-examination, economists have concluded that their scientific models of how people behave and asset prices are determined were wrong and contributed to their inability to anticipate the crisis. That is, economists confessed to their ignorance of how economies work. Since their earnest attempts to improve these models are unlikely to question the credulity that forms the shaky foundations of financial markets, it is likely that the future of financial and macroeconomics will resemble the epicycles and eccentricities of Ptolemaic astronomy in the time of its decline.⁴

Second, journalists, policy makers, and economists who began to sing a different tune after the crisis erupted, find fault with the ideology of neo-liberalism. There is widespread recognition now that deregulated and unregulated markets allowed commercial and investment banks to invent and trade in financial instruments that carried systemic risks and contributed to the failure of credit and capital markets. This doctrine that unfettered markets produce the greatest economic benefit for the greatest number, while embarrassed, is not in full retreat, at least in the U.S.⁵ That neo-liberal ideology is not vanquished by its evident failures is related to the third cause identified in these diagnostic exercises.

If ignorance excused economists and policy makers from anticipating the crisis and widely worn ideological blinkers exacerbated it, then it is badly designed incentives that are generally fingered as the most prominent and proximate cause of the crisis. Accordingly, much ink has been spilled on redesigning incentives to more effectively rein in the “animal spirits” that derail economies from their presumed path of orderly growth. As such, incentives are a flaw that recommends itself as remedy.

This conceit is perhaps best exposed in the report authored by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US government.⁶ For instance, in indicting the process and methods for generating and marketing mortgage-backed securities, the commission emphasizes that incentives unwittingly encouraged failures at every link of the chain. Low-interest rates allowed borrowers to refinance their debts and use their homes as ATM cards; lucrative fees drove mortgage brokers to herd up subprime borrowers; the demand for mortgages from Wall Street induced bankers to lower lending standards; rating agencies stamped lead as gold because paid to do so by investment bankers; the latter distributed these toxic assets worldwide relying on mathematical models of risk; and the C-suite of the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors presided over the house of card because handsomely rewarded for short term profits. Unsurprisingly, changing these incentives through more stringent regulations and better-specified rewards and punishments to guide the behaviors of different market participants occupy most of its recommendations for the path forward.⁷

This peculiar combination of ignorance, ideology, and incentives used to explain the economic crisis, also illuminates the space of contemporary politico-economic thought. Most of the heated debates on how to ensure orderly growth, center on the quantum of regulation necessary to control economic motives without stifling them. Accordingly, thinking about economic matters vacillates on a fixed line anchored by two poles-free markets on the one end and markets fettered by legally enforced regulations at the other. Only a brief exposé can be afforded here of the lineaments of this thought-space circumscribed almost two centuries ago.⁸

Around 1700, Bernard Mandeville acerbically exposed the mechanism driving economic growth. Poetically, he pointed out that it was the vices—vanity, greed, and envy—that spurred the expansion of trade and commerce. In baring the viciousness that nourished the desire to accumulate riches, he also left to posterity the problem of providing a moral justification for market activity.⁹ Adam Smith provided a seemingly lasting rhetorical solution to this moral paradox. First, he collapsed the vices into “self-interest” and so removed the sting of viciousness from the vices by renaming them. Second, he grounded “self-interest” in a natural desire to “better our condition” that began in the womb and ended in the tomb and so moralized it.¹⁰ Third, he invoked an invisible hand to transmute the self-interest of individuals into socially desirable benefits. Not only was the passage from the individual to the social thereby obscured by providential means but the private pursuit of riches was also justified by its supposed public benefits.

Thus, Smith hid the paradox unveiled by Mandeville behind a rhetorically pleasing façade. The uncomfortable insight that private vice leads to public benefit was defanged by the notion that public benefits accrue from the unflinching pursuit of self-interest. Whereas the former revealed the vicious mechanism fueling commercially oriented societies, the latter made it palatable. Faith in the efficacy of the inscrutable invisible hand thereby underwrote the purported “natural harmony of interests,” according to which the butcher and the baker in each pursuing his own ends unwittingly furthers the wealth of the nation at large.

Smith’s rhetorical convolutions were necessary because he excised use-value from political economy and founded the latter entirely on exchange-value. In contrast to his predecessors for whom the economic could not be separated from ethics and politics, Smith carves out a space for the economic by defining its domain by the determinants of market prices.¹¹ He accepted Locke’s arguments: that labor is the foundation of property rights; that applying labor transforms the commons into private property; that money ignites acquisitiveness; and that accumulation beyond use is just.¹² Smith deliberately ignores the commons and emboldens the market because it is the sphere in which acquisitiveness flourishes. He curtails his inquiry to exchange-value in full awareness of the contrasting “value-in-use.” Even if not in these precise terms, the distinction between “exchange-value” and “use-value” was known to both Aristotle and Smith. Yet, Smith is perhaps the first who recognizes that traditional distinction and nevertheless rules out use-value as a legitimate subject of an inquiry on wealth.¹³ For Aristotle, it was precisely the distinction between use and exchange that grounded the distinction between appropriate acquisition and inappropriate accumulation. More generally, it is when considerations of justice and the good constitute the starting point of thinking about man that profit-seeking becomes visible as a force that rends the political community into a commercial society. By encouraging self-interestedness, Smith allows the vainglorious pursuit of wealth to overshadow virtue as the natural end for man.¹⁴ By focusing economic science on exchange values, Smith privileges the world of goods over that of the good. The price Smith pays for ignoring use-value is the need to invoke providential the mystery by which self-interest becomes socially beneficial. Since Smith, neo-classical economics has either disavowed the distinction between use and exchange value or confessed to being incapable of understanding use-value.¹⁵ By insisting that the valuable must necessarily be useful, Marx, unlike Aristotle, could not rely on the latter to criticize the former.¹⁶

Nevertheless, it was soon discovered that individual self-interest did not “naturally” produce social benefits. Vast disparities in wealth, endemic poverty, miserable living conditions, and persistent unemployment constituted some of the many socially maligned consequences of unfettered market activity. To account for these visible failures in the natural harmony of interests, a second formula, due to Jeremy Bentham, was therefore paired to it. An “artificial harmony of interests” forged through laws and regulations were deemed necessary to lessen the disjunction between private interests and public benefits. That is, state interventions in the form of incentives – whether coded in money or by law- were thought necessary to prod wayward market participants to better serve the public interest.¹⁷

Accordingly, it is this dialectic between the natural and artificial harmony of interests that encodes the poles of the Market and the State and constitutes the thought-space for contemporary discussions on economic affairs.¹⁸ Too little regulation and markets become socially destructive; too much regulation and the wealth-creating engines fueled by self-interest begin to sputter. And yet, the continuum constituted by these two poles is unified by a common presupposition: that use-value is of no use to commerce and that the egoism implied by self-interest is both necessary and natural to commercial expansion.

Though the economic crisis has, once again, exposed the Mandevillian foundations of commercial society, thinking about it continues to function in the space marked out by Smith, Bentham and the founders of that philosophical radicalism, which erected the morality of a society oriented by exchange value on the foundation of egoism. When confined to this thought-space, one is condemned to relying, in alternating steps, on the interrelated logics of free and regulated markets. The question remains whether there is an alternative to the thought-space constituted by the State and the Market. Perhaps the answer to this question lies in taking a distance to what these logics presume: that exchange-value is of preeminent worth and that possessive individuals are to be harnessed to that cause.

Mind Trap 2: the environmental crisis

Boarded up homes and idle hands are to the ongoing crisis in economic affairs, what disappearing fish and poisoned airs are to the oncoming environmental crisis. A generation after Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, scientists are now of almost one mind: humankind’s activities on the earth have so changed it, that the species is now threatened by disaster on a planetary scale.¹⁹ What poets and prophets once warned in verse, scientists now tell us through statistics and models. Lurking beneath those dry numbers is a growing catalog of horrors – rising seas, raging rivers, melting glaciers, dead zones in the oceans, unbearable hot spots on land – that foretell an unlivable future.

Were the picture they paint not so dire, it would be laughably ironic that scientists and technocrats now disavow the fruits of the very techno-scientific machine they once served to midwife. But it is certainly tragic that in thinking about what can be done to avert the impending crisis, scientists and engineers no less than politicians and corporate bosses insist on more of the same. Attention is now directed at inventing methods to not only mitigate the physical effects of runaway industrialization, but also to re-engineer the human psyche to better adapt to such effects. Thus, from recycling plastic and increasing fuel mileage in cars to devising towers to sequester carbon undersea and engineering carbon eating plants, the proposed solutions range from the mundane to the bizarre. More generally, the debate on what to do about the conflict between economic growth and ecological integrity is anchored by two poles: at the one end, “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” technologies, and at the other, presumably “unsustainable” or environmentally destructive ones.

Thus man’s survival appears as a choice between the Prius, solar panels, biodegradable paper bags, local foods, and high density urban lofts on the one hand, and the Hummer, oil tanks, plastic bags, industrialized foods, and suburbia on the other. Eco-friendly technologies may change the fuel that powers our energy slaves but does nothing to change our dependence on them. That the fruits of techno-science have turned poisonous is seen as a problem calling for more and improved technical solutions implying that the domain of technology forms the horizon of ecological thought.²⁰ That more and different technology is the dominant response to its failure suggests that the made (techne) has replaced the given (physis). Ecological thought is confined to the space framed by technology partly because of the unstated assumption that knowledge is certain only when it is made.

It was Vico who announced the specifically modern claim that knowledge is made, that verum et factum convertuntur (the true and the made are convertible; have identical denotation). It is true that the schoolmen, in thinking through the question of the Christian God’s omnipotence and omniscience, argued his knowledge was identical to his creations. They argued this by insisting that through his creative act (making something from nothing) he expressed elements already contained within Himself. God knows everything because he made it all from his own being. However, the schoolmen humbly held that the identity of making and knowing applied only to God. Man, being created, could not know himself or other natural kinds in the manner akin to God. Since scientia or indubitable knowledge was the most perfect kind of knowledge, and nature or physis was already given to man, it implied that man could not scientifically know the sublunary world. It took a Galileo and a Descartes to turn this understanding on its head.²¹

These early moderns were “secular theologians” who tried to marry heaven and earth. They argued that geometrical objects or forms – such as triangles and squares – were unearthly. At best, such mathematical objects were “ideas” formed by the creative act of the imagination. The imagination as a site of creative activity entailed that it be unhinged from what is given. Exemplified by mathematical objects, whose perfection owes little, if anything, to the imperfect beings of the world, the secular theologians thus argued that the truth of ideas is guaranteed by the very fact that they are made.²²

The perfect and timeless shapes of geometry were once thought to be applicable only to the unmoving heavens. The sublunary sphere of generation, change, and decay was not susceptible to immobile mathematical forms. But according to the secular theologians, what was good for the heavens was good enough for the earth. By insisting that the book of nature was written in “measure, weight and number,” these early moderns raised the earth to the stars.

For them, beneath the blooming, buzzing, phenomenal world lurked the laws of nature inscribed in mathematically formulated regularities. Thus the made lay beneath the given, it required arduous experimentation – the vexing of nature – to unveil these insensible but imagined laws. Accordingly, mathematical forms and laboratory experiments constituted the preeminent methods for constructing knowledge of the world. Unhinged from the given because committed to the cause of the made, techno-science shook off its Aristotelian roots, where experience was the memorable formed from long immersion in the regularities of the world, genesis and movement were impossible to know with certainty but only for the most part, and beings in the world were possessed of substantive natures.²³

Prideful immodesty was not the only reason that early modern philosophers brought the heavens to the earth. They also did so for charitable reasons. Moved by concern for the poor this-worldly condition of man, they sought to improve man’s estate by escaping what is given – food technologies to erase hunger, cars and planes to overcome the limits of time and space, medicines to eliminate disease, and now genetic manipulations to perhaps even cheat death. Thus, pride and charity infuse that potent and world-making brew we call techno-science.²⁴

Modern techno-science grew, a bit topsy-turvy, but always cleaving close to these founding impulses. The pride that compels to know-by-construction continues to be wedded to the charity fueling the production of artifacts that better our condition by transmogrifying it. Whether TV’s or theorems, the modern techno-scientific endeavor is one by which, Entis rationis, creations or constructions of the mind, are projected and given form as entis realis, things realized. Caught in this closed loop between mind and its projections, everywhere he looks, man now sees only what he has made. Instead of recovering the garden of his original innocence, modern man is now faced with the growing desert of his own making. Yet, trapped by the premise of the identity between knowing and making, contemporary thought remains unable to think of anything other than remaking what has been badly made.²⁵

Perhaps it is this commitment to the proposition that we can know only what we make, to knowledge by construction, that forces us to be trapped within the techno-scientific frame. The environmental crisis has exposed the Achilles heel of unrestrained techno-scientific progress. Yet, faith in Progress and in Knowledge as the currency of Freedom remains unshaken. Shuttling between the poles of “sustainable” and “unsustainable” technologies, the former is proffered as the new and improved cure for the diseases caused by the latter. And once more, disinterested curiosity and solicitous concern for the welfare of others justify and reaffirm faith in salvation through technology. To escape this debilitating confine perhaps requires being disabused of the prejudicial identity between knowing and making, which animates techno-science.

Planely speaking, but not entirely

The space constituted by the dialectic between a natural and artificial “harmony of interests” enfolds the relation between free and regulated markets. The politics of a commercial republic is oriented to the satisfaction of human needs through commodities. To continually increase the satisfaction of needs, market societies must expand the sphere of commodity dependence, that is, the relentless pursuit economic growth. The production and consumption of commodities presupposes the worker and the consumer, and regardless of who owns the means of production or how profits are distributed, economic growth requires workers/consumers. Even if workers are no more likely to find well-paying jobs than are debt saturated consumers likely to buy more stuff, the social imaginary formed of workers and consumers persists. Accordingly, any effort to see beneath or beyond this confining thought-space must take its distance to this industrial mind-set formed by the thoroughgoing dependence on commodities.

Similarly, the debate on the necessity of “eco-friendly” technologies that carry a lower “ecological footprint” presupposes man as operator instead of as user.²⁶ The user is transformed into an operator when the power of a tool overwhelms that of its user. Thus, whether it is a Prius or a Hummer, both aim to improve man’s condition by frustrating his natural ability and capacity to walk. Both demand skilled operators to steer, and neither permits the degrees of freedom necessary for autonomous use. Whether promoted by the technocrat or ecocrat, men are disabled by and become dependent on their artifacts when the latter are designed for operators instead of enabling users.

The ordinary and everyday meaning of usefulness embeds it within both human purposes and human actions. A thing is useful insofar as it unleashes and extends the capacities of the user; as long as it can be shaped, adapted, and modified to fit the purposes of its users. Therefore, the capacity of a thing to be useful is limited by the innate powers or natural thresholds of the user. For example, a bicycle calls for users because it only extends the innate capacity for self-mobility. In contrast, the automobile requires immobile if adept machine operators. In this sense, the former is a convivial technology where the latter is manipulative. A hand-pump or a well can be used to raise water for drinking or bathing. In contrast, a flush-toilet or a dam must be operated to pipe or store a liquid resource. Thus, to bring to light was has been cast into the shadows requires exposing the disabling features of some technologies.

Accordingly, whatever lies beyond the thought-space marked by the dialectic of the State-Market on the one hand and that of the sustainable-unsustainable technology on the other, it must be heterogeneous to both the worker/consumer and the operator. In this search, two caveats are to be kept in mind. First, even if the question is addressed to the present, the answer must be sought for in the past. One is obliged to rummage in the dustbin of history to recover what was once muscled into it. Otherwise, imagined futures would give wing to utopian dreams just like those that have now turned nightmarish. Second, there is no going back to the past and there is no choice between the (post)industrial and the traditional immured in habit and transmitted by memory. The dependence on commodities and manipulative technologies has been and continues to be established on the destruction of alternative modes of being and thinking. There is little of the latter around, even as millions of peasants and aboriginal peoples are daily uprooted and displaced in China, India, and Latin America. But it would be sentimental and dangerous to think that one can or should bring back the past. Instead, the task for thought is to find conceptual criteria to help think through the present.²⁷

The Vernacular Domain

Ivan Illich proposed to revivify the word “vernacular” to name a domain that excludes both the consumer and the operator. The appropriate word to speak of the domain beyond dependence on commodities and disabling technologies is fundamental to avoiding one or both of two confusions. First, the presuppositions of economics and techno-science are likely to be anachronistically projected into forms-of-life that lie outside or beyond the thought space constituted by them. This is obvious when economists retro-project fables of the diamond and water “paradox,” “utility-maximization” and “scarcity” into pre-modern texts. So does the historian of technology who indifferently sees the monkey, Neanderthal man, and the university student as tool users. In a related vein, forms-of-life orthogonal to techno-scientifically fueled economies are likely to be misunderstood. Thus, those who today refuse modern conveniences are labeled Luddites or just cussed, while those who get by outside the techno-scientific and commodity bubbles are classified as backward or poor.

A second, more potent, confusion flourishes in the absence of a word adequate to the domain outside technologically intensive market societies. Disabling technologies no less than wage work can produce or generate unpaid toil. That the spinning jenny and the computer have put people out of work is well-known. But it is less familiar that waged work necessitates a shadowy unpaid complement. Indeed, wage work is a perhaps diminishing tip of the total toil exacted in market-intensive societies. Housework, schoolwork, commuting, monitoring the intake of medicines or the outflows from a bank account are only a few examples of the time and toil devoted to the necessary shadow work compelled by commodity-intensive social arrangements. To confuse the shadow work necessitated by the separation of production and consumption with the unpaid labor in settings where production is not separated from consumption is to misunderstand shadow work as either autonomous action or the threatened and shrinking spaces outside the market.²⁸

Indicative of this confusion is the use of such terms as “subsistence economy,” “informal economies,” or “peasant economy” to refer to what has been cast into the shadows. By adding an adjective to the “economy,” historians and anthropologists unwittingly reinforce the grip of what they intend to weaken. By merely modifying the “economy” they are nevertheless beholden to its presuppositions. A similar weakness attends the term “subsistence.” While its etymology is noble and invokes that which is self-sufficient and stands in place, its modern connotations are irredeemably narrow and uncouth. In primarily invoking the modes by which people provided for their material needs – food and shelter – “subsistence” reinforces the economic by negation. With its connotations of “basic necessities” or “bare survival,” subsistence desiccates the varied and multifarious forms-of-life once and still conducted beyond the space circumscribed by the machine and the market. One cannot speak of “subsistence architecture” as one can of vernacular architectures. “Peasant” or “informal” does not modify dance and song, prayer and language, food and play. And yet, these are integral to a life well-lived, and at least historically, were neither commodified nor the products of techno-science. It is to avoid such blinding confusions that Illich argued for rehabilitating the word “vernacular.“²⁹

Though from the Latin vernaculum, which named all that was homebred, homemade, and homespun, it was through Varro’s restricted sense of vernacular speech that the word “vernacular” enters English. The history of how vernacular speech was transmuted into a “taught mother tongue,” is an exemplar of not only what lies beyond the contemporary thought-space but also for what may be worthy of recuperation in modern forms.³⁰

Elio Antonio de Nebrija was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus. In 1492, he petitioned Queen Isabella to sponsor a tool to quell the unruly everyday speech of her subjects. In the Spain of Isabella, her subjects spoke in a multitude of tongues. To discipline the anarchic speech of people in the interest of her power Nebrija noted, “Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate.” To unify the sword and the book through language, Nebrija offered both a rulebook for Spanish grammar and a dictionary. In a kind of alchemical exercise, Nebrija reduced lived speech to a constructed grammar. Accordingly, this conversion of the speech of people into a national language stands as a prototype of the forays in that long war to create a world fit for workers/ consumers and operators.

Nebrija fabricated a Spanish grammar as a tool to rule enlivened speech. Because standardized and produced by an expert, his grammar had to be taught to be effective. Moreover, following grammatical rules for speech conveys the belief that people cannot speak without learning the rules of grammar. By this dispensation, the tongue is trained to repeat the grammatical forms it is taught; the tongue is made to operate on language. Hence, the natural ability to speak that can be exercised by each and all is transformed into an alienable product requiring producers and consumers. The conversion of everyday speech into a teachable mother tongue thus renders what is abundant into the regime of scarcity – to the realm of exchange-value. Instruction in language not only disables the natural powers of the speaker but also makes her dependent on certified service providers. Thus, Nebrija’s proposal at once discloses and foreshadows the world populated by workers and operators, by the market and the machine.

The war against the vernacular has been prosecuted for some 500 years.³¹ Once the commodity and market occupied the interstices of everyday life. Today, it is everywhere. For most of human history, tools were shaped by the purposes and limited by the natural abilities of its users. Today, their machines enslave the majority of people, particularly in advanced industrial societies. Though this transformation has and is occurring in different places at different times and rates, it nevertheless duplicates the diagram of how standardized Spanish grammar disembedded the speech of people. For instance, the rapacious “primitive accumulation” that enclosed the commons in the 17^th century, uprooted English peasants from the land to make them fully dependent on wages. A similar dispossession now occurs in China and India, where hundreds of millions move from farms to factories and slums. Aboriginal tribes of the Amazon are being dispossessed and killed now with the same impunity as those in Australia and the Americas once were. For entertainment, children now operate PlayStations where they once kicked around a ball on the street. Mega-churches in the US indoctrinate the flock with power point slides and music, much as teachers, trainers, and coaches do in classrooms around the country. Food scientists, nutritionists, and plant pathologists provide just some of the inputs that consumers depend on for their daily calorie intake. Whether in single-family homes or boxes piled on top of each other, people live in houses seemingly cut from an architect’s template. Women in India now demand valentine cards with as much enthusiasm as Turkish men purchase hair, calf, and chest implants. The historical record is rife with examples that stand as witnesses to the continuing destruction of the vernacular –whether of food, shelter, song, love, or pleasures.

It is by attending to the historical specificity of our present predicament in the mirror of the past that Illich thus reveals a third axis that lies orthogonal to the plane circumscribed by the axes of commodity intensity and disabling technologies. On this z-axis are located forms of social organization anchored by two heterogeneous forms. At the point of origin of this three-dimensional space, are social arrangements that plug people into markets and machines and thereby prevent them from exercising their freely given powers. At the other end of this z-axis is found a profusion of social forms, each different from the other, but all marked by suspicion towards the claims for techno-science and the commodity.

For these modes of social organization, the difference between “sustainable” and “unsustainable” technologies is a chimera. Instead, what matters is the real distinction between convivial and disabling technologies. Similarly, the purported difference between regulated and free markets, between public and private property does little to shape these social forms. Instead, they are animated by the distinction between the household and the commons. Thus, the Amish of Pennsylvania curtail their use of such power tools as tractors. The Bhutanese limit the number of tourists to whom they play host. Some cities in Germany and Denmark have banned the car to make way for the bicycle and walking. Whether on a rooftop in Chicago or by the rail track in Mumbai, diverse groups rely on their vegetable patches for some their daily sustenance. While community supported agriculture build bonds of personal dependence, ceramic dry toilets and related forms of vernacular architectures allow people to dwell. In a fine essay by Peter Linebaugh on the Luddites and the Romantics, one is persuaded by the implicit claim that communism for the 21st century may need to mimic in a new key, the courageous Luddite defense of the vernacular.³² Even Marx, in his last years, was less of a Marxist than many of those who spoke in his name. He was far more open to the peasant communes of Russia and Western Europe than usually assumed.³³

These modes and manners of living in the present are informed by the past. Those engaged in the attempt to unplug from the market and the machine know that the reign of property – whether private or public-was erected on the ruins of the commons and that the ubiquity of disabling technologies-whether sustainable or not-was achieved by denigrating convivial tools. Yet, crucially, knowing what is past has gone, they are not dogmatic in their fight. They practice a form of bricolage, opportunistically taking back whatever they can get. A shared lawnmower here, an overgrown and weed infested garden there, a political struggle to retain artisanal fishing in Kerala, a move to the barricades in the Chiapas, the willingness to peddle cocaine derived home remedies in Peru and building illegal tenements on public lands in Sao Paulo, each effort is aimed at reducing the radical monopoly of commodities and disabling technologies. Such ways – of fishing, farming, cooking, eating, dwelling, playing, praying or study – are as diverse and varied today as the people who engage in them. However, what they have in common is being oriented by the same genus, the vernacular.

Epistemic Prudence

The effort to fight against the continuing war on the vernacular also extends to the activity of thinking.³⁴ What is confused for knowledge today is largely R&D funded and deployed by government and industry. Scientists, whether in the employ of universities, governments, or corporations, produce objective knowledge for use by others. The pertinent question for those affected by these circuits of knowledge production and sale is to ask if there are vernacular styles of thinking. Is there a kind of thought justified by neither pride nor charity? What is the nature of rigorous thought that is nevertheless conducted among friends and aimed at shaping one’s own modes of life in more beautiful ways? Are some styles of thinking better suited to comprehending the vernacular?

It is likely that the intellectual effort appropriate to bringing vernacular ways out of the shadows might itself be self-limiting. I suggest the now discarded notion of common sense as a criterion to both comprehend the vernacular domain and to recognize the styles of thought appropriate to it. Though the history of common sense is too tangled a story to be told here, it is sufficient to note its primary meaning, at least in English. The first meaning of common sense is the Aristotelian “sensus communis”: “The common bond or center of the five senses; the endowment of natural intelligence possessed by rational beings.”³⁵ This understanding of the common sense stretches from at least Plato to Descartes and, in this primordial sense, refers to the faculty necessary for the exercise of reasonable judgments. Contrary to popular prejudice today, common sense does not refer to the content of what is known but rather how knowledge is achieved. Common sense is not reducible to a body of propositions or of knowledge-claims: instead, it is the ground from which judgments are reached, particularly, the judgment of what is appropriate, fitting, or adequate.³⁶

Briefly, common sense is that faculty which synthesizes sense impressions into perceptions of the world. In turn, the active intelligence abstracts concepts from these sensible perceptions. An echo of this activity of the intellect still resonates in the word “concept,” etymologically related to grasping or touching. That concepts are tethered to percepts, which are rooted in the sensual, underwrites that Aristotelian commonplace, “nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses.” Concepts are abstractions. But precisely because they are abstractions from the real, they maintain an accord between the world and the mind. Stated simply, both perception and the concepts that flow from them are dependent on what is given to the senses; conceptions of the world depend on grasping the world as it is.

Yet, techno-science is based on precisely turning this understanding on its head. Indeed, the announcement of Vico may be taken as the slogan behind which a common sense understanding of the world was slowly suffocated. From the very beginning of modern science, knowing is understood to be the same as making: the Cartesian plane is as constructed as an airplane; the Poisson distribution is as fabricated as a pipette in the laboratory. Modern scientific ideas are not concepts tethered to the senses; instead they are constructs. Constructs, as the word suggests, are made and not given. As Einstein famously said, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and not…uniquely determined by the external world.” Though wrong to use the word “concepts,” his acknowledgement that scientific theories are created underscores how scientific constructs fractures the common sense tie between perception and reality.

The sharp distinction between concepts and constructs recalls that the modern world is constructed and that people and things are often resized to fit in. Concepts are forms of thought engendered by the common sense, which itself expresses the union between the world and the senses. Concepts reflect a way of knowing things from the outside in – from the world to the mind. In contrast, constructs are forms of reflexive thought expressing a way of knowing from the inside out – from the mind to the world.In modern times, what is made up does not ideally conform to what is given. Instead, what is given is slowly buried under the made-up world.

Scientific constructs are therefore not rooted by a sense for the world. Indeed, given the contrast between concepts and constructs, it follows that scientific ideas are non-sense. They are not abstracted from experience but can often be used to reshape it. They can be experimentally verified or falsified. But experiments are not the stuff of ordinary experience. No experiment is necessary to verify if people breathe, but one is required to prove the properties of a vacuum. Experiments are necessary precisely to test what is not ordinarily evident, which is why they are conducted in controlled settings and also used to propagandize the unusual as ordinarily comprehensible. Experimental results are neither necessarily continuous with nor comprehensible to everyday experience; they do not clarify experience but usually obfuscate it.

Unlike R&D, vernacular styles of thought are neither institutionally funded nor directed at the purported happiness and ease of others. Moreover, vernacular thinking also cleaves closely to the common sense understood as the seat of reasonable judgments. Thus, it avoids the monstrous heights to which thought can rise on the wings of the unfettered imagination. Accordingly, the ability to grasp the vernacular demands not only the courage needed to buck academic pressures but also to avoid those flights of theoretical madness powered through the multiplication of constructs.³⁷

To draw out some features of the form of thought adequate to the vernacular domain, consider Illich’s essay titled Energy and Equity, where he distinguishes between transport, transit, and traffic. Whereas transit bespeaks the motion afforded to man the self-moving animal, transport refers to his being moved by heteronomous means, whether car, train, or plane. There, a bullock cart transports villagers headed to the market. Here cars transport commuters to the workplace. By common sense perception, transport – whether by cart or car – perverts transit, which is embodied in the freely given capacity to walk. To those who cannot perceive the sensual and carnal difference between walking and being moved as a Fedex package, the distinction between transport and transit is unpersuasive. It is equally unpersuasive to those mired in that constructed universe where all motion is identified with the displacement of any body in space. The ritualized exposure to passenger-miles – whether in cars or classrooms – is the likely reason for the inability to perceive the felt distinction between transport and transit. Thus, the elaboration of concepts to properly grasp the vernacular domain cannot but begin by placing the constructions of the economy and techno-science within epistemic brackets.

Yet, if it is to be reasonable, such an exercise in epistemic hygiene cannot be immoderate.³⁸ The contrast between transport and transit is clear and distinct, rooted as it is in phenomenologically distinct perceptions. Yet, traffic is a theoretical construct, proposed to comprehend any combination of transport and transit. This necessity for constructs is nevertheless undermined by their being tethered to and by concepts. Accordingly, the conceptual grasp of the world hobbles the free construction of it. The distinction between concepts and constructs does not imply refusing the latter at all costs but rather entails seeing the hierarchical relation between them. That is, vernacular styles of thinking do not exclude theoretical constructs but only seek to keep them in their place.

A second and related feature of vernacular thought-styles confirms its moderate and indeed, modest nature. In accord with vernacular ways, vernacular thought does not demand the exclusion or excision of that which is antithetical and foreign to its domain – the market or the machine. For instance, vernacular thought does not demand the erasure of transport so that transit can flourish. Instead, because rooted in the perceived accord or just proportion between the transit and transport, vernacular thought insists only that the capacity for auto-mobility impose a binding constraint on transport. The suggestion that the speed limit for cars be roughly the same as that reached by a bicycle is rooted in the argument that traffic be calibrated by the lexicographic preference for transit over transport.

Thus, vernacular ways of thinking in consonance with doing and being do not deny constructs – whether imagined or realized. It merely refuses the characteristically modern identification of knowing and making, of reducing thinking to calculating, of displacing the relation between subjects and their predicates by quantitative comparisons. In seeing beyond the prejudice that compares beings in terms of “measure, number, and weight,” vernacular thought reanimates a second form of quantitative measurement that, with it, was also cast into the shadows. Recall, as Einstein admitted, scientific constructs are free creations of the mind, exemplified by mathematical constructs – equations, calculations, and the like. But such mathematical measurement is only the inferior of two kinds of quantitative measurement.

In The Statesman, Plato argues for the distinction between arithmetical and “geometric” measures.³⁹ While both are forms of quantitative measurements, arithmetical or numerical measure is independent of the purposes of the calculator and either correct or incorrect. In contrast, “geometric” measurements of too much or too little are inextricably bound to intentionality and therefore never simply correct or incorrect but always measured with respect to what is just right or fitting. To clarify the distinction, consider the following two points. Given a conventional measure – gallons or liters – a quantity of water can be precisely and universally measured as 4. However, whether 4 is too much or too little depends on whether one intends to fill a 3 or 5 gallon pail; or to put out a blazing fire or to water a horse. The frame of intentionality or purpose thus defines the quantitative measurement of greater or lesser, of more or less. Accordingly, the numerical measure of plus or minus 1 gains its meaning from and is therefore subordinate to the non-numerically measure of too much or too little. Moreover, it is also relative to purpose that 3 or 5 is considered fitting, appropriate or just right.

But there is a second point to be emphasized about the relation between so-called arithmetical and “geometrical” measurements. Arithmetical measures are utterly sterile when it comes to answering the question of purpose, of what is to be done. That is, the question of whether a given end is appropriate or fitting cannot be debated in mathematical symbols. In fact, the opposite is true. It is always possible to ask if applying arithmetical measures to a particular situation is appropriate. Thus, whether one should fill a 5-gallon pail, or construct a mathematical model of human behavior or fabricate a measure called ecological footprint are unanswerable in numerical terms.⁴⁰

That arithmetical measurements cannot adjudicate its own appropriateness shows they are inferior in rank or hierarchically subordinate to “geometric” measurement. The question concerning purpose is preeminently a question of ethics, of justice among persons. Moreover, since personal relationship cannot but be grounded in the embodied sense of and for another, it follows that ethical judgments must be rooted in common sense. Thus, geometric measures of what is just and right, of what is appropriate and fitting, are judgments formed of the common sense. Accordingly it follows that concepts should regulate and serve as norms for constructs and, analogously, that vernacular ways should regulate techno-scientific constructions.

Past or Future?

Illich’s plea to resuscitate the vernacular must be taken seriously – especially now, when the ongoing economic and ecological crises reveal the restricted thought-space within which contemporary debates continue to be conducted. Just as the demand for more regulated markets expose exchange-value as the presupposition of economic thought, so also the call for sustainable or eco-friendly technologies expose the grip of techno-science on the modern imaginary. The vernacular, we could say, lies orthogonal to these axes of markets and machines, offering us a unique standpoint from which to interrogate the present. While the object of an almost 500 year long war, it nevertheless persists within the interstices and byways of modern life, ready for reactivation.

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