A snail, after adding a number of widening rings to the delicate structure of its shell, suddenly brings its accustomed building activities to a stop. A single additional ring would increase the size of the shell sixteen times. Instead of contributing to the welfare of the snail, it would burden the creature with such an excess of weight that any increase in its productivity would henceforth be literally outweighed by the task of coping with the difficulties created by enlarging the shell beyond the limits set by its purpose. At that point, the problems of overgrowth begin to multiply geometrically, while the snail’s biological capacity can at best be extended arithmetically.
Ivan Illich, Gender, 1973
From Quodlibet …
Whatever the deep reasons for the decline of the West, the crisis which we are living in all decisive senses of the term, it is possible to summarise the extreme outcome by taking up the icastic image of Ivan Illich, which one could call the “snail theorem”.
“If the snail,” says the theorem, “after having added a certain number of coils to its shell, instead of stopping, continued its growth, a single additional coil would increase the weight of its house by 16 times, and the snail would be inexorably crushed by it.” This is what is happening in the species that was once defined as homo sapiens as regards technological development and, in general, the hypertrophy of the legal, scientific and industrial apparatuses that characterise human society.
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Louise Michel in New Caledonia
From the CrimethInc. collective (29/05/2024) …
In honor of Louise Michel’s birthday [29/05/2024] and the ongoing anticolonial resistance in New Caledonia, we offer an account of her time in exile there, beginning from her arrival in November 1873. This story illustrates how regimes force their own subjects into service in colonial projects, as well as the prisoners they capture in other colonial endeavors. It is also worth remarking that, like Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and many other 19th-century anarchists, Louise Michel only came to formally identify as an anarchist after spending time with Indigenous people. While many of her colleagues nonetheless retained Eurocentric notions about “progress” and “civilization,” Louise Michel wholeheartedly sided with Indigenous resistance to French colonialism. She is remembered more warmly today than most French settlers in New Caledonia.
A work of literary nonfiction, this narrative draws on Michel’s memoirs, her book Légendes et chansons de gestes Canaques, and several other sources. For more background on Louise Michel’s time in New Caledonia, consult the reading list below.
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