Mediation is the Message

Question: What you say leads us to one question - how can we think against the particular thought that dominates an specific moment?

I don´t actually think that being an organic intellectual is inevitably subversive of power, and all subversive of domination. I don´t think it´s inevitable I´m not inevitably oppositioned. That´s not my position in the world. My position in the world is: I look at each situation, evaluate it in terms of my owns beliefs and concerns for the collectives I´m interested in, and make my judgement. So I´m not always a subversive person, I´m not always subversive of power. Because power is a variable, it´s not inevitably bad, it´s sometimes better that in other times, that´s a historical judgement. So I´m different to those people that see themselves as always oppositioning, always against domination. We know some of those people. I think that´s more to do with their own kind of psychoanalytical conditions. I´m normally interested in domination and I´m normally opposed to much of what comes there, but I will make the judgement according to the historical moment. That´s my point. So it makes all sorts of differences as to whether you believe in just constant opposition, constant resistance. I mean, I tend to come out a lot of the time, but not always. I´ll evaluate each historical moment. Let´s go back and look at the politics in England in the 60´s and then in the 90´s. In the 1960´s, domination, as you call it, was reasonably progressive in it´s orientation. You had a Labour government, much influenced by a lot of progressive forces in the society, you had a very affluent kind of economy. Profits were being made anyhow. There was enough money to build up schools, to pay an inclusive pedagogy, to actually develop a whole kind of set of very interesting social experiments. At that time, I was not opposed to domination, I was working with the general kind of liberal force of that domination. At other times I would be opposed, but in that moment the two were in reasonable harmony for me to create the kind of prefigurative politics I talked about. So I think it´s a very interesting question, as whether one is inevitably subversive in a position as an intellectual. My own instinct to it is no. I take, I evaluate. This is the link between analysis and action. For me the two things are the same actually, which is you look into a situation, you try and read the situation and the trajectories as best as you can with the things you have in mind in terms of action, you make a series of judgements and then you take action. There was a man called (Stanley/ Stan Lee) in England who set up a commune, under (...´s) times. And fought like hell for this piece of land for all the people. In the end they killed all the people and put him in prison. The last thing he said was "I thought, I acted, I am at peace". And that´s kind of the way I feel, you know, you think it through, you act as best as you can, and that´s your contribution. But it´s not inevitably always fighting, it´s not always opposition. There´s this belief though that annoys me about certain aspects of life in politics, that you always have to be fighting, that you always have to be on the barricade, you always have to be oppositioned. It isn´t true. I mean sometimes yes, sometimes no. Of course power tends to be of a particular sort, but sometimes it´s more benign. Sometimes you can work better with it than at other times. Sometimes I would be very oppositional, and other times I´d be less though. I don´t see it as a kind of psychological need to always be contesting power at every point. I mean, you know the history of Argentina, there´s been power that you could work with, and power that you would oppose with everything you´ve had, you´d leave the country, you´d go away, you´d fight it in any way you could. But at other times, you know, in 1916 maybe power was ok, 1928 to 1940, you could work there. Power is not monolithic any more than anything else is. It doesn´t always work badly. Sometimes it moderates, and you can work with a moderate (...).

Question: We are speaking now about the relationship between political action and theoretical activity. And it seems to us that your ideas point the need to reconsider the tradition of certain critical theory and the connection that is made between theory production, political position and conception of power.

We can set two difference issues. In terms of the first of those, critical theory. I think some of the comments I´ve just made are in some ways related. If a theory becomes a constant oppositional posture, whatever power is doing, a constant ongoing conspiracy theory, then that does not square with my understanding of history. History is a little more variable than that. It´s true power is often very corrupt, that´s true, but sometimes less than other times. And I suppose I have a number of problems with it that we talked about before. Although I´m much inclined to think myself in a very independent way. And one of them is what I said that it´s a posture of constant opposition.
The second one is that it seems to me to proceed in the wrong sequence towards understanding of the world. It starts with a theoretical presupposition very often, not always, generally. Some theories of that sort start with a theory of the world, which then search the world for proof. I prefer to work in the other sequence. You go into the world with a set of obviously theoretical training's, no doubt, and prejudices and desires. But basically, you come to theory through the battle with data. I believe you saturate yourself with data, you live among data in the world, and you come to theory. Of course you travel from theory to theory, I understand that. But none the less, you come to theory in a particular way. My way of working is through a very detailed, hard working analysis of the micro and mezzo activities in the world, to develop some theories about what is actually going on. And that leaves me with a different presupposition about power. As I come to understand how power is affecting the way people act and look in the world, I can make distinctions between relatively, shall we say, liberal times, and relatively oppressive times. And I believe that these do have some cyclical kind of (…). So if I was to analyze the world with a theory which I thought would always stand, I would stand against the kind of cyclical understandings of different changes that have happened. I make a very important distinction, in the first book I wrote in 1982, called "School subjects and curriculum change", between "domination" and "mediation". Domination and mediation go this way that there are certain "conjunctures" where dominant interest groups intervene to set up a structure. At the moment a reform is coming down, which will set up certain structural parameters by action. That´s a moment -if you will- of dominant interest groups wishing to restructure in a very systematic way. At that dominant moment, structure is put in place and it includes a pattern of resources and a pattern of aspirations. That´s a moment of, we can say, domination. Once they put that reform in place, a different politics takes place. It´s not daily domination. It follows very quickly with what will be a public long period of mediation. While that structure is administered and managed and run and activated by other people who will take back from it certain degrees of autonomy space and other strategic politics. In other words, be mediating a structure which was once put in place by domination. That distinction between domination and mediation is naturally the critical point, because it gets the heart of how power works. Power doesn´t work in most places most of the time, by constantly telling you what to do. In my book the phrase which I like the most is: "this is less a story of domination by dominant groups, more a story of solicitous surrender by subordinate groups". That´s mediation. That is very different to the idea of domination as a founding system. And that´s the root of my different sequence to theory. I read the world differently, I don´t think domination works as systematic pression. I believe it works as mediated surrender by subordinate groups. That´s a very different conception of power.