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<font size="4">'''Section 1: Introduction'''</font> - (see [[Convivial Theory Outline]])

==Preface and declaration of method==
I lack the qualifications for the task I want to undertake. I should have spent years researching my subject; I should have read many more books. In a world of specialized knowledge, I have failed to specialize in the field I want to explore. My knowledge contains too many gaps. But I lack the time to fill them. I must somehow adapt to this fact.

A force nonetheless lifts me up and carries me forward. That force is the vision, the image I have of a system of vessels and channels, of a living body of possibilities. My task is to present the vision, to try to explain how the organs of that living body of thought work together. It is a web: if you pull one knot, the rest of the mesh will come with it. It is a cycle: if you start the cycle running, it will feed itself and grow.

My vision is the strength; my ignorance is the weakness. The method will therefore be to focus on the strength, and to admit the weakness. When there is a book that remains to be read, I will name it. When there is an argument that remains to be developed, I will say so. Thus I plan to travel from gap to gap: here is a part that I see, here a part is missing, and here again is a part that I see.

This approach will make for a sorry narrative. The text that follows will be worse than fragments. A writer of aphorisms is at peace with the blank spaces between the bits. Here the voids will be like holes in flesh that bleed and fester. The hope is that the tortured body will somehow take form, that the vision will find articulated embodiment.

==The expert and the average person==
What is the opposite of an expert? The average person that one meets in the street.

Illich wanted to give creative capacity back to the average person. He pointed to a fundamental movement in modern society, by which specialized knowledge has become concentrated in the hands of professional elites, who profit from their position to consolidate monopolies over the corresponding area of endeavor. This process also is cyclic.

...to be continued...

==end of section 1==
Return to [[Convivial Theory Outline]].

[[Category:Convivial Theory]]