“Unpluggers who seek new forms of dwelling”: Ivan Illich on dwelling and the vernacular
Edit March 2020: I was thinking about leaving the U.S. in 2019 when I wrote this. It’s about Illich, but it was also a way of thinking about my decision.
“To dwell is an art […] The human is the only animal who is an artist, and the art of dwelling is part of the art of living.” So says Ivan Illich in an essay called “Dwelling” that appears in In the Mirror of the Past. The modern world has rendered this art increasingly difficult. Many of us are liable to experience housing, he says, more than dwelling. Housing embeds us in a discourse of management, biology, or political economy. Housing provides a place to live in a biological sense, or in a bureaucratic one, but not a place to dwell.
Illich’s essay mentions anarchist squatters in Berlin and favela dwellers in Brazil. Both are examples of people who “insist now on their liberty to dwell on their own,” even if they lack the authority or the rights to do so. By linking the two, Illich places under one umbrella two groups usually thought of as distant when viewed from the perspective of an economic development narrative: youth squatters in Europe are at one end of the arc and the poor of Brazil are at the other. Today we might also include people living in vans or cars in the United States, or off-grid in cabins, or in tiny homes, or in eco-villages in Latin America. These are all of them new types of “unpluggers,” like the ones that he discusses in the essay.
Key parts of the essay turn on the concept of the vernacular. The connection to vernacular architecture is clear, but this was largely a felicitous coincidence. Illich had been cultivating a special use of the word (described by critic George Scialabba as a “term of art” for Illich) over a period of years prior to writing this essay. To the best of my knowledge, Illich first really fleshed out his understanding of the terms “vernacular domain” and “vernacular values” in a group of essays that were published as Shadow Work. The concept grew directly out the critiques that he had formulated in earlier books on schooling, the professions, healthcare, and transportation. Vernacular activities of life occur outside, or refractory to, the global economy and all those institutions and systems that are the mechanisms for “man’s ever growing powers” in the modern world.
In Shadow Work, he unified his observations on “shadow work” in developed countries (his term for things like informal labor or the unpaid work of social reproduction) with his critique of development in the global South by contrasting them both with the space of the vernacular. He wanted to recall the use of the word to refer to local, unofficial languages and dialects, before the imposition of a politically-approved unifying language. The term is a kind of shorthand, then, for everything that the dehumanizing systems of modernity trample upon: the human-scale, the local, the contingent, the free or freely arising, etc.
[Read Illich on vernacular values here.]
The vernacular domain, for Illich, was also associated with the idea of the commons, those parts of the world, like forests, that once served as spaces in pre-capitalist societies to which people “had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households” (Illich, from Shadow Work). Sometimes people in the modern commons movement cite Illich as an important influence on their ideas and goals. There is no doubting the connection, but it also seems important to remember that the vernacular and the commons are not synonyms, and Illich’s vernacular values diverge from some aspects of the modern commons movement. Vernacular refers to the homegrown and the off-grid, to spaces and activities outside of both hierarchical control and systems of exchange. To the extent that the commons movement is invested in formulating public policy, for example, it seems to me that the vernacular element recedes. The vernacular is refractory to formal institutionalization — that’s what makes it vernacular. Indeed, one of the points that Illich stresses about the commons (unlike many other writers on the topic) is that they were not established by law, only by unwritten custom. For policy-oriented people, this aspect Illich’s thought is maddening — yet it goes all the way down.
Illich was an important critic of programs for international economic development, and he remains an important resource for alternative economic theorizing. In Beyond Western Economics: Remembering Other Economic Cultures (2009), Trent Schroyer highlights the relevance of Illich’s “vernacular” to struggles against globalization. (It’s worth remembering here the extent to which much of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s was indebted to earlier critics of development.) The vernacular, says Schroyer, is “central to those places and spaces where people are struggling to achieve regeneration and social restorations against the forces of economic globalization.”
I sometimes think that the vernacular makes a perfect anarchist foil — creative, local, contingent, and philosophically rich — to political concepts such as the “democratic,” or the “popular” of populism, or the “social” of socialism. And on a deeper level, I think that the vernacular is, for Illich, evocative of, if not synonymous with, the space where grace appears in the world — the space of the surprise, of the freely arisen, that exists below or alongside the operations of institutional human power.
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Some excerpts from “Dwelling”:
From commons for dwelling the environment has been redefined as a resource for the production of garages for people, commodities and cars. Housing provides cubicles in which residents are housed […] The vernacular space of dwelling is replaced by the homogeneous space of the garage. Settlements look the same from Taiwan to Ohio and from Lima to Peking. Everywhere you find the same garage for the human — shelves to store the work-force overnight, handy for the means of its transportation.
Those who insist now on their liberty to dwell on their own are either very well off or treated as deviants. This is true both for those whom so-called ‘development’ has not yet untaught the desire to dwell, and for the unpluggers who seek new forms of dwelling that would make the industrial landscape habitable — at least in its cracks and weak spots. They will be branded as intruders, illegal occupants, anarchists and nuisances, depending on the circumstance under which they assert their liberty to dwell: as Indians who break in and settle on fallow land in Lima; as favellados in Rio de Janeiro, who return to squat on the hillside from which they have just been driven by the police; as students who dare to convert ruins in Berlin’s Kreuzberg into their dwelling; as Puerto Ricans who force their way back into the walled-up and burnt buildings of the South Bronx. They will all be removed, not so much because of the damage they do to the owner of the site, or because they threaten the health or peace of their neighbors, but because of the challenge to the social axiom that defines a citizen as a unit in need of a standard garage.
‘Build-it-yourself’ is thought of as a mere hobby — or as a consolation for shanty-towns. The return to rural life is dubbed romanticism. Inner-city fishponds and chickencoops are regarded as mere games. Neighborhoods that ‘work’ are flooded by highly-paid sociologists until they fail. House-squatting is regarded as civil disobedience, restorative squatting as an outcry for better and more housing. But in the field of housing, as much as in the fields of education, medicine, transportation or burial, those who unplug themselves are no purists. I know a family that herds a few goats in the Appalachians and in the evening plays with a battery-powered computer. I know an illegal occupant who has broken into a walled-up Harlem tenement and sends his daughters to a private school.
Neither ridicule nor psychiatric diagnosis will make the unpluggers go away.
