According to Illich, human beings spontaneously produce collective use values in their everyday lives without the need for mediating institutions. Children, for instance, learn their first language not by paying a service provider to teach it, but by naturally interacting with their caregivers. One of the most important instruments for human conduct is thus not the product of any economic exchange or coordinated production process. Language and conversation give meaning to our lives, even if they are not planned to serve any predetermined function. They just happen as a gift of life. In Illich’s philosophy, there is a realm of human relationality able to sustain the good life beyond the grasp of the market or the state.
Illich laments, however, that institutions like the Church, the market, or the state have increasingly invaded the vernacular realm in order to manage and measure it. Previously gratuitous interactions, like regular conversations, thereby become ‘shadow work.’ In Marxist vocabulary, one would say that modern industrialism tends to render non-productive, ‘free’ time functional to labour-time. The conversations and human contact we have outside of work become hidden props for keeping the production process running. Marx subsequently sought to revolutionize modern industry by encouraging the proletariat to take over the means of production, but Illich, on the other hand, tries to rekindle the flame of the original, non-commodified use values. One should not overtake the industrial apparatus, but dismantle its hold on human relations. To stay with the example of language learning, Illich documents that, in premodern times, there existed no standardized languages apart from Latin and Greek. Just like children learned languages through everyday speech, adults spoke hybrids built from whatever they picked up in casual conversation with others. Language was thereby useful to individuals without explicitly serving the general mode of production. But with the invention of the printing press, these vernacular tongues became dangerous to the Church, the economy, and the state. People spent too much time reading and conversing in vernacular languages beyond centralized control. At the threshold of modernity, Illich thus claims Church and state officials invented the idea of a mother-tongue with fixed grammars and vocabularies. This allowed for standardized and efficient communication across cultures and it enabled centralized control over larger groups of people, but it also demanded that individuals adapt their spontaneous speech according to the guidelines of textbooks and dictionaries. From that moment onward, language had to be taught and popular speech was put under professional control.
