Ivan Illich

Without the challenge of the Netherlands Design Institute's Doors of Perception Conference on the theme of Speed, we would not have sat down, around our table in Bremen, Germany to reflect on worlds in which speed in any of the presently accepted normal senses is unknown -- a reflection of these worlds could not have started once among us. Thank you for this challenge, and let me put it in decent English: 'God speed thee and thy close'. That is how Milton still uses 'speed': it is a sentence from the young Milton. I like the idea that it comes from Milton, because Mrs. Nicholsons has shown that it is in Milton's writings that 'space' comes into English. Milton is a younger contemporary of Shakespeare. If you look at Shakespeare 'space' does not mean (in spite of the contemporary understanding of some sentences as Hamlet's) something three dimensional. 'Give me some space' means: 'give me a while before I have to die, or to do something'. In young Milton it is the same thing. Only old Milton can step from star to star into infinite space.

Space had to separate from time before it became possible to accept kilometres 'per' hour: distance-over-time as a fraction and not as an intrinsic relationship. Speed is something which contemporary people seem to take for absolutely granted. When I had the chance of listening to the conversations at this conference, I had a very funny feeling: that speed is one of those terms by which contemporaries imprison themselves in a world -- 'huis clos' -- out of which there is no exit. We discuss high and low, fast and slow, endurable and destructive Speed. And I reflected on contemporaries caught in Speed, fantasising of odd becoming 'slowbies', as one just said. Speaking of the good life as for slow life, immediately makes clear that a life of low Speed is meant. The possibility of getting away from this concept just did not occur...

Inevitably as I thought of this self-imprisonment, I had to think of a meeting at the Northern Academy in Oslo, organised by Nils Kristi, which attended fourteen top prison administrators -- from the Russian who have 1,2 million people in prison, to Mrs. Hawk, who is Clinton's Commissioner of Correction. These people understood that their prisons did none of the four things prisons are supposed to do: punish, or avenge, or prevent crime, and whatever the fourth one is: keeping people off the road, locked away, because we only multiply people who went to commit crimes. We all knew that their prisons were useless, but we also knew that they were caught in a social trend to which people inside the system had no way to resist.

I had to listen to these lectures, to these presentations, like here: 20 minutes exactly per country... 14 countries... top administrators..., and then to take the last day for reflection. I was desperate! For a moment I thought, trying to prepare myself, I'd tell them that I was a monk who was sent by his Abbot around the year 1300 to Jerusalem to see the holy places, but had fallen into a time warp and ended at this meeting in Oslo. Who was quite confused of what he heard, because he knew his theology, he knew that Christian princes, according to the rules of morals and theology, were not allowed to use prisons as a means of punishment, but only as a way of keeping people until they could publicly cut off their limbs, kill them or get ransom for them.

But here, I could not talk about it this way. So I asked myself in front of whom am I standing? And I suddenly had the impression that I was standing in front of 14 national high priests who celebrated a very expensive ritual which had the purpose of exhibition to a population losing the sense of freedom, every day more. Precisely because we have ever quicker options for 'yes/no choices'... but there were other people around, victims, who had less freedom than they. In a funny way I had the impression that they were speaking about 'speed': controlling speed, designing speed.

'Design' is a little bit older than 'speed' as we know from the listings of architecture. We are trying to maintain at all costs insistence on speed as a natural given, not as a historical entity. It was unthinkable before! Well, for goodness gracious sake, I did not know what I had to say! Is not the idea of distance-in-a-certain-time something naturally given? I answer immediately: just as much as proportionality. 'Ana-logia' is used by Euclid to speak of proportion, but until the late Middle Ages nobody would interpret that (and careful studies have been done on this). The fifth book of Euclid is speaking about fractions: our kilometres-per-hour are not to be as a fraction, but would be seen as aims at a harmony, as both my colleages Sebastian Trapp and Matthias Rieger have showed...

As shown in Trapp's talk the appropriate behaviour of a falcon, when hunting, can't be seen as something 'comparable', something in the strict sense 'observable'. Before people were not trained, nor used, nor prepared to observe their society or to observe themselves. So where observation comes in only in the late 16th century in all the use of languages, it means using a device to identify the height of a star or the sun at a certain moment of the day. There is an immense difference between this observing attitude, in which we need the analytic and abstract concept of speed and several others which become natural to us, and living in a world in which we are present to each other, carefully avoiding observation.

I was already a teacher in the sixties -- believe me or not -- when it was much more common wing than it is today that some student in the seminar, who had been silent for the last three hours, would suddenly say: 'yes, I have been sitting around here for three hours and this is what I have observed: every time...' As soon as this happened I would interrupt and say: 'Sir, would you kindly get up? Get out! And close the door!' Horror in the room. Ivan Illich got it bad. 'Did you hear me? If you are here as an observer I don't want you. You are disturbing what we want to do: be with each other, talk to each other, be critical of each other. Not by using measurements which are imported from the outside -- which means observing.'

Now, the most important thing we might be able to tell you is how we tried, around our table, to be critical of each other when one of us tries to import the certainties of the age. Principally those technogenic certainties which have generated the kind of soma which we have; certainties which are 'somata-poietic' into the conversation, when we want to look at each others eyes, because we want to become aware of what things, devices tell us, try to convince us about (rather than just see), what we do in society again in an observable and measurable way. Doing this, we hope to recover for ourselves the sensitivity for those cracks within the modern every day, for those moments which we can cultivate and extend and expend, in which the certainties of the outside will be upset and even elided: washed out of us, cleaned from us through our mutual help.

Free time is not leisure in the traditional sense of 'otium', which means: 'very conscious', conscious to be Here, being present in the Now. Will the pursuit of durability be for a securing of investments, or for the saving of the environment? Slowness as opposed to rapidity means quiet as opposed to rapid and rapacious -- having very close meanings if you look in the dictionaries. We must in order to do this critically, to become designers to have this kind of inner willingness and desire to search for quiet. (Please, don't misunderstand me, I am not a new-age guru of some kind), I am simply speaking of the fact that speed, understood as fraction, speed as a social expression of velocity, represents a reduction of that which speed meant, which I wished to humanity: namely vitality, 'Geistesgegenwart'. The Spanish have a beautiful word for it: 'ensimismarse'; Ortega was often speaking about this 'en si mismo': 'en-self' oneself (without having to use that dubious English word 'self').

Most great cultures which I know do not require any compulsionate obligatory education. They do not know the idea of 'homo educantos'. They did not move into the direction of believing that human beings are born with a lack, which sucking from institutional nipples called schools or educational devices or the Internet has to offset. But we do have places, spaces, occasions for training in this intensity of vitality, which through the Now eliminates any form of rush. Think of Zen archery, think of the Chinese painter who meditates half an hour before his hand just places the letters there, think of the Brahmans whom I have seen so often sitting along the Ganga next to a dying family member waiting carefully, most attentively..., which one will be the last breath... Knock at his front and say: 'now!..., now!'

Speed thrills, speed kills, speed invites to be controlled. Speed invites us, if we look at its consequences as we do in this meeting, to go slow. This is not what we are concerned with. We are concerned with the quickening of the pace of life so that it fits appropriately. like with the hunting falcon -- strange birds we are! I could not help, when Sebastian Trapp spoke about Frederic II, to think of a tragic moment in his life when his beloved falcon that he had received as a gift from the Sultan had gone after the eagle and had brought down the eagle. The falcon came back and Frederic, deeply disturbed, felt that he had to call the execution now and publicly, and solemnly had that falcon executed, cut his head off, because, misunderstanding his hierarchy he had gone after his king, the eagle, and that had to be punished by death. It is honest contrary of comparisons of speed, to speak about this way of dignity in movement.

These are things which I am suffering about not having understood 25 or 30 years ago when I wrote 'Energy and Equity'. I really was stupid enough then, as a 30 years younger man, to speak about the speed of walking on foot, of bicycling, and further enthused by the writings of Mr. Whiteman, about the energy efficiency of men on a bicycle, which could be compared only with that of a certain fish of the black sea... I get red, when I remember this, but something one learns in life. As the time has come while designers (who can not help but being designers, just as prison administrators have to be prison administrators for the rest of their lives, and good ones and decent ones) reduce speed, some serious thinking has to go on about the possibility of moving out of the age in which speed seems a naturally given certainty.

And it is not so difficult, because [unless the conclusions to which these three friends (Trapp, Rieger, Illich, ed.) and another five or six or seven powerfully moved, are wrong] in the last few years we have moved over an important threshold. A threshold which might be as important as that which introduced the possibility of speaking of 'velocitas', velocity, from late scolasticism to Galileo. We got difficulties from doing it -- to the point which is a trend or an inclination, an integration, a threshold which is as important as that: taking any reasonable way of speaking about the experience of speed out of our life.

We might be already beyond the age of speed by having moved into the age of (and I am saying the word with a certain trembling) 'real time'. The move towards real time is one way out of the world of speed. We'll move as much as we can our designs into 'real time' so that we can be 'slowby', there where the traditional rail road originated concepts of speeds apply...

This is not the way in which I would like to encourage my friends to go, in spite of the 'regelmaessiger Perspektive' that designers have to go that way. I would rather look for ways in which we (in friendship, in mutual severe criticism of the youth, of past and contemporary certainties) deal with each other. As people who empowered through friendship seek presence, being Here, being Now, being -- and that is the English word -- Quick. You know what the word 'quickening' meant: the first kick of a baby in the belly of a woman. 'Quickening' meant: coming alive, quick.