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Circle
for Research on Proportionality (CROP)
Bremen, September 1999 (originally adressed to
Jerry Brown)
This memorandum
will introduce you to our project and to some
of our group's members. We are a circle of friends
who have come together through Ivan's lectures
and around the spaghetti table of Barbara Duden
at Penn State and in Bremen. This circle includes
among others: Johannes Beck, professor of education,
and Antje Menk, professor of linguistics (University
of Bremen, Germany). Professor Barbara Duden is
a historian at the University of Hanover (Germany).
Constantine Hatzikiriakou is professor of mathematics
at the University of Crete (Greece). Sajay Samuel
teaches accounting at University of Connecticut
and Samar Farage is professor
of sociology at Penn State University, both in
the United States. Matthias Rieger and Silja Samerski
are completing their dissertations in musicology
and biology, respectively. Lee Hoinacki is a philosopher
and theologian and a long-standing collaborator
of Ivan Illich. In order to discuss the loss of
the sense for proportionality, we have met over
the last three years with fellow-thinkers in Germany,
Italy, the United States, and Mexico.
In these conversations,
each of us in a peculiar way, tries to follow
a line of inquiry provoked by Illich. To say what
we are about with one term we have found no better
word than proportionality. In using this term
we try to recover the sense that fit, good, even
true, had in other times. Delving into history,
we track the loss of this correspondence, the
sense for which has withered. Through this quest,
we do not seek a nostalgic revival of the past
nor a contribution to new age spiritualism. Instead,
by looking from the past into the present, we
hope to gain a perspective on the contemporary
absence of proportionality and its consequences
for how we perceive others and ourselves.
The I-Thou relation
is crucial to our understanding of proportionality.
In his Bremen lectures, Illich explored this historically
unprecedented relation in the West through the
parable of the Samaritan. In this relation only
a second person --a Thou-- gives orientation to
an I. According to Illich, this act of freely
turning towards another was revolutionary because
it was neither determined by the common nativity
in the Greek Polis, nor by being subject to Roman
law, nor by the fear of a divine legislator, nor
by the interiorization of norms either as conscience
or as moral imperative. For decades, Illich has
argued that, to understand two millennia of Western
existence it is necessary to start out from this
Christian calling to friendship. The institutionalization
of charity perverts this calling by turning friendship
into services. Beginning with third-century shelters
for the homeless and well beyond the emergence
of asylums in France during the late eighteenth
century, service institutions have turned neighbors
into clients. The emergence of a service economy
is by now well understood. What we want to clarify
is a transformation of the social domain that
happened during the last couple of decades: institutions
no longer service clients, they now manage their
profiles.
Genetic counseling
is an extreme example of such a managed relationship.
In the counseling session, a woman expecting a
child faces an expert in risk management and in
the statistics of chromosomal distributions. He
instructs her on the biological facts of conception
and of her risks from fertilization. Referring
to her condition and related variables, the geneticist
defines her as member of a statistical population.
Every biological abnormality correlated to that
population now appears as a threat: either to
her or to the expected child. The geneticist reinforces
these threats by pictures of malformed children,
Mendelian diagrams and risk curves. She is asked
to recognize the child, the 'Thou' she was expecting,
as a chimera of numbered chances. At this stage,
the geneticist assures her that she is informed
enough to make a decision. As the last and final
step of the ritual, she has to make a judgment
using this information. It is she who must decide
whether, based on a statistical profile of the
fetus, she prefers to deliver it alive or dead.
Today, there are
many examples for pressures to identify either
you or me with data profiles. Judges send people
to jail, doctors pronounce them dead, teachers
certify them, managers pay them, and they are
no more than a composite of data. Management increasingly
manipulates personnel to comply with imputed characteristics.
It is in this milieu when Thou has become a technogenic
datum profile that we raise the question of friendship.
Over the next
five years, we want to find out how judgment and
resolve were replaced by decision-making, how
care and responsibility have leached out that
which we want to cultivate. Our different backgrounds
strengthen our grasp of the desiccation of the
I-Thou relation. Sajay Samuel clarifies how in
modern management such techno-scientific 'objects'
as lifestyles, human resources, and quality of
life have replaced persons. Focusing on genetic
counseling, Silja Samerski describes how management
techniques refashion motherly love. Barbara Duden
shows how the misplaced concreteness of the scientifically
recoined term, 'pregnancy at risk', ravages the
somatic constitution of women. In contrast to
the contemporary management of the sick, Samar
Farage investigates the relatedness, grounded
in Philia, between physician and patient in the
Galenic tradition. Matthias Rieger provides us
with a detailed model for the breakdown of proportionality
through his study of the dissolution of musical
harmony in the eighteenth century. For Kostas
Hatzikiriakou, the identification of unity and
number in the seventeenth century is a key for
understanding how values could replace the good
in ethics.
We are in the
midst of a series of symposia on these topics.
We offer our written exchanges and minutes of
our meetings to a broader circle of readers. In
the tradition of Ivan and Barbara's practice of
hospitality, we invite friends and others to our
little thinkery. We invite everybody who would
like to share in our conversations to join our
meetings as a guest around the spaghetti table,
to critically read and contribute to our writings. |