path: root/data/pages/en/article/1998-conspiracy/Illich, Ivan - 1998 Illich-Conspiracy.md

Ivan Illich   
Kreftingstr. 16   
D - 28203  Bremen   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**The Cultivation of Conspiracy **  
  
A translated, edited and expanded version   
of an address given by Ivan Illich at the Villa Ichon in Bremen, Germany,   
on the occasion of receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen, March 14, 1998.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
_Printed:_ 23.06.00   
_Filename and date:_ ICHON-IB.DOC   
_Old filename and date_ : Ichon-ib.c22   
  
  
  
  
_STATUS:_   
1. _Distribution_   
- no limits   
  
2. _Copyright_   
- To be published in: Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham, eds., Ivan Illich: What’s He   
Said Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Title and date tentative.   
  
  
  
  
For further information please contact:   
Silja Samerski Kreftingstr.16 D - 28203 Bremen   
Tel: +49-(0)421-76332 Fax:  +49-(0)421-705387 e-mail: piano@uni-bremen.de  


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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**THE CULTIVATION OF CONSPIRACY **  
  
A translated, edited and expanded version of an address given by Ivan Illich at the Villa Ichon   
in Bremen, Germany, on the occasion of receiving the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen,   
March 14, 1998.   
  
  
On November 16, 1996, I arrived at the library auditorium of Bremen University just in time   
for my afternoon lecture. For five years now I had commented old texts to trace the long history of   
western philia, of friendship. This semester's theme was the loss of the common sense for   
proportionality during the lifetimes of Locke, Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach. On that day I   
wanted to address "common sense" as the sense-organ believed to recognize "the good", the "fit" and   
the "fifth". But even before I could start I had to stop: the roughly two hundred auditors had planned   
a party instead of a lecture. Two months after the actual day, they had decided to celebrate my   
seventieth birthday, so we feasted and laughed and danced until midnight.   
  
Speeches launched the affair. I was seated behind a bouquet, in the first row, and listened to   
seventeen talks. As a sign of recognition, I presented a flower to each encomiast. Most speakers   
were over fifty, friends I had made on four continents, a few with reminiscences reaching back to the   
1950s in New York. Others were acquaintances made while teaching in Kassel, Berlin, Marburg,   
Oldenburg and, since 1991, in Bremen. As I grappled for the expression of gratitude fitting each   
speaker, I felt like Hugh of St. Victor, my teacher. This twelfth-century monk in a letter compares   
himself to a basket-bearing donkey: not weighed down but lifted by the burden of friendships   
gathered on life's pilgrimage.   
  
From the laudationes at the library we moved across the plaza to the liberal arts building,   
whose bleak cement hallways I habitually avoid. A metamorphosis had occurred in its atmosphere.   
We found ourselves in a quaint café: some five dozen small tables, each with a lighted candle on a   
colored napkin. For the occasion, the university's department of domestic science had squeezed a pot   
into the semester's budget, a pot large enough to cook potato soup for a company. The chancellor,   
absent on business in Beijing, had hired a Klezmer ensemble. Ludolf Kuchenbuch, dean of   
historians at a nearby university and a saxophonist, took charge of the jazz. A couple of clowns   
performing on a bicycle entertained us with their parody of my 1972 book, Energy and Equity.   
  
The mayor-governor of the city state, Bremen, had picked a very old Burgundy from the   
treasures of the Ratskeller. The lanky and towering official handed me the precious gift and   
expressed his pleasure "that Illich at seventy, in his own words, had found in Bremen 'einen Zipfel   
Heimat'," something like "the tail end of an abode." On the lips of the Bürgermeister, my expression   


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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seemed grotesque, but still true. I began to reflect: How could I have been induced to connect the   
notion of home with the long dark winters of continual rain, where I walk through the pastures along   
the Wümme that are flooded twice a day by the tide from the North Atlantic? I who, as a boy, had   
felt exiled in Vienna, because all my senses were longingly attached to the South, to the blue   
Adriatic, to the limestone mountains in the Dalmatia of my early childhood.   
  
Today's ceremony, however, is even more startling than last year's revelry, because your award   
makes me feel welcomed by the citizenry rather than just by a city father. Villa Ichon is a   
manifestation of Bremen's civility: neither private charity nor public agency. You, who are my hosts   
in this place, define yourselves as Hanseatic merchant citizens. On the day Villa Ichon was solemnly   
opened, you pointedly refused to let a city official touch the keys to this house, this "houseboat for   
the uninsured and vulnerable among us" as Klaus Hübotter has called it. By insisting on your   
autonomy you stressed the respectful distance of civil society from the city's government. I am   
touched that this annual award, meant to honor a Bremen citizen, should today go to an errant   
pilgrim, but to one who knows how to appreciate it. As the eldest son of a merchant family in a free   
port city - one that was caught between the contesting powers of Byzantium and Venice - I was born   
into a tradition which, in the meantime, has petered out, but not without leaving me sensitive to the   
flavor of the Hanseatic hospitality you offer today.   
  
I first heard of Bremen when I was six, in the stories told me by my drawing teacher, who came   
from  one of your patrician families, and in Vienna was homesick for the North. I adopted the tiny,   
black-dressed lady as Mamma Pfeiffer-Kulenkampf. One summer she came along with us to   
Dalmatia, to paint. Her watercolors still grace my brothers study. From her I learned how to mix   
different pigments for the contrasting atmospheres of a Mediterranean and an Atlantic shore.   
  
Now, a long lifetime later, I am at home in her salty gray climate. And not just at home: I now   
fancy that my presence has added something to the atmosphere of Bremen university. When Dean   
Johannes Beck led me from the aula through the rainy plaza into the makeshift cafe he made a   
remark that I accepted as a gift. "Ivan," he said "this feels like an overflow of Barbara Duden's   
house." Dean Beck put into words the accomplishment of something I had aimed at for decades \--   
the plethora of the dining-room conviviality inspiring the University Aula; The aura of our   
hospitality in the Kreftingstrasse, felt well beyond its threshold.   
  
Even before my first Bremen semester could start, Barbara Duden got a house in the Ostertor   
Viertel, beyond the old moat, just down from the drug-corner, the farmers market and the Turkish   
quarter. There Barbara created an ambiance of austere playfulness. The house became a place that   
at the drop of a hat accommodates our guests. If \-- after my lecture on Fridays \-- the spaghetti bowl   
must feed more than the two dozen who fit around the table made from flooring timber, guests squat   
on Mexican blankets in the next room.   
  


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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Over the years our "Kreftingstraße" has fostered privileged closeness in respectful, disciplined,   
critical intercourse: friendships between old acquaintances who drop in from far away, and new   
ones, three, even four decades younger than my oldest companion Ceslaus Hoinacki, who shares his   
room with our Encyclopedias. Friendship makes ties unique, but some more than others bear the   
burden of the host. Kassandra who lives elsewhere, has a key to the house and brings the flowers   
and Matthias, the virtuoso drummer who stays downstairs, in the room that opens on the tiny   
garden, belong to the dozen who can equally welcome the newcomer at the threshold, stir the soup,   
orient conversation, do the dishes and  ... correct my manuscripts as well as those of each other.   
  
Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is   
acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest   
for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to   
friendship. Therefore I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and the "conditioned air" that   
hinders the growth of friendship.   
  
Of course I can remember the taste of strong atmospheres from other epochs in my life: I have   
never doubted that \-- today, more than ever \-- a "monastic" ambience is the prerequisite to the   
independence needed for a historically based indictment of society. Only the gratuitous commitment   
of friends can enable me to practice the ascetisme required for modern near-paradoxes: as that of   
renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba.   
  
My early suspicion that atmosphere was a prerequisite for the kind of studium to which I had   
dedicated myself became a conviction through my contact with post-Sputnik American universities.   
After just one year as vice-chancellor of a university in Puerto Rico, in 1957 I and a few others   
wanted to question the development ideology to which Kennedy no less than Castro subscribed. I put   
all the money I had - today the equivalent of the prize you just gave me - into the purchase of a one-  
room wooden shack in the mountains that overlook the Caribbean. With three friends I wanted a   
place of study in which every use of the personal pronoun "nos-otros" would truthfully refer back to   
the four of "us", and be accessible to our guests as well; I wanted to practice the rigor that would   
keep us far from the "we" that invokes the security found in the shadow of an academic discipline:   
we as "sociologists", "economists" and so forth. As one of us, Charlie Rosario, put it: "All   
departments smell - of disinfectants, at their best; and poisoned sterilized aura." The "casita" on the   
route to Adjuntas soon became so obnoxious that I had to leave the Island.   
  
This freed me to start a "thinkery" in Mexico that five years later turned into CIDOC. In his   
introductory talk for today's celebration congressman Freimut Duve told you about it. In those   
distant years Duve was editor at Rowohlt, took care of my German books and several times spent   
time with me there, in Cuernavaca. He told you about the spirit prevailing in that place: a climate of   
mutually tempered forbearance. It was this aura, this quality or air, through which this ephemeral   
venture could become a world crossroads, a meeting place for those who, long before this had   


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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become fashionable, questioned the innocence of "development." Only the mood that Duve hinted at   
can explain the disproportionate influence that this small place exerted in challenging the goods of   
socio-economic development.   
  
CIDOC was closed by common accord on April first, ten years to the day after its foundation.   
With Mexican music and dancing we celebrated its closing. Duve told you about her, who did it,   
Valentina Borremans: she had directed and organized CIDOC from its inception, and he told you   
about his admiration for the style in which she closed it by mutual consent of its 63 collaborators.   
She knew that the soul of this free, independent and powerless "thinkery" would have been squashed   
soon by its rising influence.   
  
CIDOC shut its doors in the face of criticism by its most serious friends, people too earnest to   
grasp the paradox of atmosphere. These were mainly persons for whom the hospitable atmosphere   
of CIDOC had provided a unique forum. They thrived in the aura of CIDOC, and outright rejected   
our certainty that atmosphere invites institutionalization by which it will be corrupted. You never   
know what will nurture the spirit of a philia, while you can be certain what will stifle it. Spirit   
emerges by surprise, and it's a miracle when it abides; it is stifled by every attempt to secure it; it's   
debauched when you try to use it.   
  
Few understood this. With Valentina I opened the mayor's bottle of Burgundy in Mexico to   
celebrate one of them. We drank the wine to the memory of Alejandro Del Corro, a now deceased   
Argentine Jesuit who lived and worked with me since the early sixties. With his Laica he traveled   
around South America, collaborating with guerrilleros to save their archives for history. Alejandro   
was a master at moderating aura. Wen he presided, his delicate attention to each guest: guerrillero,   
US civil servant, trash collector or professor felt at home with each other around the CIDOC table.   
Alejandro knew that you cannot lay a claim on aura, he knew about the evanescence of atmosphere.   
  
I speak of atmosphere, faute de mieux. In Greek, the word is used for the emanation of a star,   
or for the constellation that governs a place; alchemists adopted it to speak of the layers around our   
planet. Maurice Blondel reflects its much later French usage for bouquet des ésprits, the scent those   
present contribute to a meeting. I use the word for something frail and often discounted, the air that   
weaves and wafts and evokes memories, like those attached to the Burgundy long after the bottle has   
been emptied.   
  
To sense an aura, you need a nose. The nose, framed by the eyes, runs below the brain. What   
the nose inhales ends in the guts; every yogi and hesichast knows this. The nose curves down in the   
middle of the face. Pious Jews are conscious of the image because what Christians call "walking in   
the sight of God" the Hebrew expresses as "ambling under God's nose and breath." To savor the feel   
of a place, you trust your nose; to trust another, you must first smell him.   
  


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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In its beginnings, western civic culture wavered between cultivated distrust and sympathetic   
trust. Plato believed it would be upsetting for Athenian citizens to allow their bowels to be affected   
by the passion of actors in the theater; he wanted the audience to go no further than reflecting on the   
words. Aristotle respectfully modified his teacher's opinion. In the Poetics, he asks the spectators to   
let gesture and mimicry, the rhythm and melody of breath, reach their very innards. Citizens should   
attend the theater, not just to understand, but to be affected by each other. For Aristotle, there could   
be no transformation, no purifying catharsis, without such gripping mimesis. Without gut level   
experience of the other, without sharing his aura, you can't be saved from yourself.   
  
Some of that sense of mimesis comes out in an old German adage, "Ich kann Dich gut riechen"   
(I can smell you well), which is still used and understood. But it's something you don't say to just   
anyone; it's an expression that is permissible only when you feel close, count on trust, and are   
willing to be hurt. It presupposes the truth of another German saying, "Ich kann Dich gut leiden" (I   
can suffer [put up with] you [well]). You can see that nose words have not altogether disappeared   
from ordinary speech, even in the age of daily showers.   
  
I remember my embarrassment when, after years of ascetical discipline, I realized that I still   
had not made the connection between nose and heart, smell and affection. I was in Peru in the mid-  
fifties, on my way to meet Jaime, who welcomed me to his modest hut for the third time. But to get   
to the shack, I had to cross the Rimac, the open cloaca of Lima. The thought of sleeping for a week   
in this miasma almost made me retch. That evening, for some reason I suddenly understood with a   
shock what Carlos had been telling me all along, "Ivan, don't kid yourself; don't imagine you can be   
friends with people you can't smell." That one jolt unplugged my nose; it enabled me to dip into the   
aura of Carlos's house, and allowed me to merge the atmosphere I brought along into the ambience   
of his home.   
  
This discovery of my nose for the scent of the spirit occurred forty years ago, in the time of the   
DC-4, belief in development programs, and the apparently benign Peace Corps. It was the time   
when DDT was still too expensive for Latin American slum dwellers, when most people had to put   
up with fleas and lice on their skins, as they put up with the old, the crippled and idiots in their   
homes. It was the time before Xerox, fax and e-mail. But it was also a time before smog and AIDS.   
I was then considered a crank because I foresaw the unwanted side effects of development, because I   
spoke to unions on technogenic unemployment, and to leftists on the growing polarization between   
rich and poor in the wake of expanding commodity dependence. What seemed hysteria then has now   
hardened into well documented facts; some of these facts are too horrible to face. They must be   
exorcised: bowdlerizing them by research, assigning their management to specialized agencies, and   
conjuring them by prevention programs. But while the depletion of life forms, the growing immunity   
of pathogens, climate changes, the disappearance of the job culture, and uncontrollable violence now   
make up the admitted side effects of economic growth, the menace of modern life for the survival of   
atmospheres is hardly recognized as a terrible threat.   


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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This is the reason I dare to annoy you with the memory of that walk in the dusk with my nose   
full of the urine and feces emanating from the Rimac. That landscape no longer exists; cars   
now fill a highway hiding the sewage. The skin and scalp of Indians is no longer the habitat of lice;   
now the allergies produced by industrial chemicals cause the itch. Makeshift shanties have been   
replaced by public housing; each apartment has its plumbing and each family member a separate   
bed - the guest knows that he imposes an inconvenience. The miasma of the Rimac has become a   
memory in a city asfixiated by industrial smog. I juxtapose then and now because this allows me to   
argue that the impending loss of spirit, of soul, of what I call atmosphere, could go unnoticed.   
  
Only persons who face one another in trust can allow its emergence. The bouquet of friendship   
varies with each breath, but when it is there it needs no name. For a long time I believed that there   
was no one noun for it, and no verb for its creation. Each time I tried one, I was discouraged; all the   
synonyms for it were shanghaied by its synthetic counterfeits: mass-produced fashions and cleverly   
marketed moods, chic feelings, swank highs and trendy tastes. Starting in the seventies, group   
dynamics  retreats and psychic training, all to generate "atmosphere," became major businesses.   
Discreet silence about the issue I am raising seemed preferable to creating a misunderstanding.   
  
Then, thirty years after that evening above the Rimac, I suddenly realized that there is indeed a   
very simple word that says what I cherished and tried to nourish, and that word is peace. Peace,   
however, not in any of the many ways its cognates are used all over the world, but peace in its post-  
classical, European meaning. Peace, in this sense, is the one strong word with which the atmosphere   
of friendship created among equals has been appropriately named. But to embrace this, one has to   
come to understand the origin of this peace in the conspiratio, a curious ritual behavior almost   
forgotten today.   
  
This is how I chanced upon this insight. In 1986, a few dozen peace research centers in Africa   
and Asia were planning to open a common resource center. The founding assembly was held in   
Japan, and the leaders were looking for a Third World speaker. However, for reasons of delicacy,   
they wanted a person who was neither Asian nor African, and took me for a Latin American; then   
they pressured me to come. So I packed my guayabera shirt and departed for the Orient.   
  
In Yokohama I addressed the group, speaking as a historian. I wanted first to dismantle any   
universal notion of peace; I wanted to stress the claim of each ethnos to its own peace, the right of   
each community to be left in its peace. It seemed important to make clear that peace is not an   
abstract condition, but a very specific spirit to be relished in its particular, incommunicable   
uniqueness by each community.   
  
However, my aim in Yokohama was twofold: I wanted to examine not only the meaning but   
also the history and perversion of peace in that appendix to Asia and Africa we call Europe. After   


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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all, most of the world in the twentieth century is suffering from the enthusiastic acceptance of   
European ideas, including the European concept of peace. The assembly in Japan gave me a chance   
to contrast the unique spirit of peace that was born in Christian Europe with its perversion and   
counterfeit when, in international political parlance, an ideological link is created between economic   
development and peace. I argued that only by de-linking pax (peace) from development could the   
heretofore unsuspected glory hidden in pax be revealed. But to achieve this before a Japanese   
audience was difficult.   
  
The Japanese have an iconogram that stands for something we do not have or say or feel:   
foodó. My teacher, Professor Tamanoy, explained foodó to me as, "the inimitable freshness that   
arises from the commingling of a particular soil with the appropriate waters." Trusting my learned   
pacifist guide, since deceased, I started from the notion of foodó. It was easy to explain that both   
Athenian philia and Pax Romana, as different as they are from each other, are incomparable to   
foodó. Athenian philia bespeaks the friendship among the free men of a city, and Roman pax   
bespeaks the administrative status of a region dominated by the Legion that had planted its insignia   
into that soil. Thanks to Professor Tamanoy's assistance, it was easy to elaborate on the   
contradictions and differences between these two notions, and get the audience to comment on   
similar heteronomies in the cultural meaning of peace within India or between neighboring groups in   
Tanzania. The kaleidoscopic incarnations of peace all referred to a particular, highly desirable   
atmosphere. So far the conversation was easy.   
  
However, speaking about pax in the proto-Christan epoch turned out to be a delicate matter,   
because around the year 300 pax became a key word in the Christian liturgy. It became the   
euphemism for a mouth-to-mouth kiss among the faithful attending services; pax became the   
camouflage for the osculum (from os, mouth), or the conspiratio, a commingling of breaths. My   
friend felt I was not just courting misunderstanding, but perhaps giving offense, by mentioning such   
body-to-body contact in public. The gesture, up to this day, is repugnant to Japanese.   
  
The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be   
translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious   
suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a   
ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman,   
thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring.   
  
In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one   
of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became   
the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit   
with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape   
in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of   
this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was   


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine   
milieu.   
  
The other eminent moment of the celebration was, of course, the comestio, the communion in   
the flesh, the incorporation of the believer in the body of the Incarnate Word, but communio was   
theologically linked to the preceding con-spiratio. Conspiratio became the strongest, clearest and   
most unambiguously somatic expression for the entirely non-hierarchical creation of a fraternal   
spirit in preparation for the unifying meal. Through the act of eating, the fellow conspirators were   
transformed into a "we," a gathering which in Greek means ecclesia. Further, they believed that the   
"we" is also somebody's "I"; they were nourished by shading into the "I" of the Incarnate Word. The   
words and actions of the liturgy are not just mundane words and actions, but events occurring after   
the Word, that is, after the Incarnation. Peace as the commingling of soil and waters sounds cute to   
my ears; but peace as the result of conspiratio exacts a demanding, today almost unimaginable   
intimacy.   
  
The practice of the osculum did not go unchallenged; documents reveal that the conspiratio   
created scandal early on. The rigorist African Church Father, Tertullian, felt that a decent matron   
should not be subjected to possible embarrassment by this rite. The practice continued, but not its   
name; the ceremony required a euphemism. From the later third century on, the osculum pacis was   
referred to simply as pax, and the gesture was often watered down to some slight touch to signify   
the mutual spiritual union of the persons present through the creation of a fraternal atmosphere.   
Today, the pax before communion, called "the kiss of peace," is still integral to the Roman,   
Slavonic, Greek and Syrian Mass, although it is often reduced to a perfunctory handshake.   
  
I could no more avoid telling the story in Yokohama than today in Bremen. Why? Because the   
very idea of peace understood as a hospitality that reaches out to the stranger, and of a free   
assembly that arises in the practice of hospitality cannot be understood without reference to the   
Christian liturgy in which the community comes into being by the mouth-to-mouth kiss.   
  
However, jusyt as the antecedents of peace among us cannot be understood without reference to   
conspiration, the historical uniqueness of a city's climate, atmosphere or spirit calls for this   
reference. The European idea of peace that is synonymous with the somatic incorporation of equals   
into a community has no analogue elsewhere. Community in our European tradition is not the   
outcome of an act of authoritative foundation, nor a gift from nature or its gods, nor the result of   
management, planning and design, but the consequence of a conspiracy, a deliberate, mutual,   
somatic and gratuitous gift to each other. The prototype of that conspiracy lies in the celebration of   
the early Christian liturgy in which, no matter their origin, men and women, Greeks and Jews, slaves   
and citizens, engender a physical reality that transcends them. The shared breath, the con-spiratio   
are the "peace" understood as the community that arises from it.   
  


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
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Historians have often pointed out that the idea of a social contract, which dominates political   
thinking in Europe since the 14th century, has its concrete origins in the way founders of medieval   
towns conceived urbane civilities. I fully agree with this. However, by focusing on the contractual   
aspect of this incorporation attention is distracted from the good that such contracts were meant to   
protect, namely, peace resulting from a conspiratio. One can fail to perceive the pretentious   
absurdity of attempting a contractual insurance of an atmosphere as fleeting and alive, as tender and   
robust, as pax.   
  
The medieval merchants and craftsmen who settled at the foot of a lord's castle felt the need to   
make the conspiracy that united them into a secure and lasting association. To provide for their   
general surety, they had recourse to a device, the conjuratio, a mutual promise confirmed by an oath   
that uses God as a witness. Most societies know the oath, but the use of God's name to make it stick   
first appears as a legal device in the codification of roman law made by the Christian emperor   
Theodosius. "Conjuration" or the swearing together by a common oath confirmed by the invocation   
of God, just like the liturgical osculum is of Christian origin. Conjuratio which uses God as epoxy   
for the social bond presumably assures stability and durability to the atmosphere engendered by the   
conspiratio of the citizens. In this linkage between conspiratio and conjuratio, two equally unique   
concepts inherited from the first millennium of Christian history are intertwined, but the latter, the   
contractual form soon overshadowed the spiritual substance.   
  
The medieval town of central Europe thus was indeed a profoundly new historical gestalt: the   
conjuratio conspirativa, which makes European urbanity distinct from urban modes elsewhere. It   
implies a peculiar dynamic strain between the atmosphere of conspiratio and its legal, contractual   
constitution. Ideally, the spiritual climate is the source of the city's life that flower into a hierarchy,   
like a shell or frame, to protect its order. Insofar as the city is understood to originate in a   
conspiratio, it owes its social existence to the pax the breath, shared equally among all.   
  
This long reflection on the historical precedence to the cultivation of atmosphere in late   
twentieth century Bremen seemed necessary to me to defend its intrinsically conspiratorial nature. It   
seems necessary to understand why, arguably, independent criticism of the established order of   
modern, technogene, information-centered society can grow only out of a milieu of intense   
hospitality.   
  
As a scholar I have been shaped by a monastic traditions and by the interpretation of medieval   
texts. Early on I took it for granted that the principal condition for an atmosphere that is propitious   
to independent thought is the hospitality cultivated by the host: a hospitality that excludes   
condescension as scrupulously as seduction; a hospitality that by its simplicity defeats the fear of   
plagiarism as much as that of clientage; a hospitality that by its openness dissolves intimidation as   
studiously as servility; a hospitality that exacts from the guests as much generosity as it imposes on   
the host. I have been blessed with a large portion of it, with the taste of a relaxed, humorous,   


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_Ivan Illich: The Cultivation of Conspiracy_   
11  
sometimes grotesque fit among mostly ordinary but sometimes outlandish companions who are   
patient with one another. More so in Bremen than anywhere else.   


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