Mediation is the Message

Question: ... I think that a constructionist perspective is a way to deconstruct structuralist arguments like Bernstein's, and that we are able to use notions as "boundaries" not in a structuralist perspective. But the moment of domination is the moment of the creation of new boundaries in social structure.

That´s correct, but my point is that most of the time, if you look across history, it´s not times of creation of boundaries, it´s times of mediation and systematic dissolution of boundaries. So people are working within the boundaries, if you will, so they´re working within structure, but in a way, they are re-making daily (…) structure. So it is to say, if you only understand in structuralist terms, you´re only thinking about some very unusual moments in history. The point really is not to understand boundary making per se, but to understand how people deal with, play with, cross boundaries, border boundaries. That´s the sociological challenge. Not to understand the moment of domination, but to understand long going moments of mediation. Because otherwise you silence agency. The great problem of that kind of theorizing is in many ways it´s complicity with power, because it believes power is more powerful than power is. It celebrates power. Structuralism in that sense celebrates domination. Whereas I would be more interested in celebrating mediation because it hands back degrees of capacity to people, which often ends up with solicitous surrender to boundaries. But sometimes it doesn´t. It gives you a chance to leave the question open as to what your daily activity and habitus is. I´m not saying therefore you are a dominated, powerless individual, which is the basic message of much of this theory. And not surprisingly, most teachers, most of the time have said "no thank you". Because the message is "you are a powerless person who cannot read structure, you don´t know what you´re doing, you don´t see the boundaries which are restricting your consciousness". Some of this is true, but not surprisingly, teachers have said "your interpretation of me as a powerless player out of domination; I reject. Whether I am or not, I´m not buying your book". So I would prefer to spin this in a way which I think is inherently true, which is to say the interesting case is how these moments of structuralist domination get mediated. Most of the time, we´re talking mediation, not domination.

Question: In your believe about the power of celebrating mediation and no domination is not a touch of desire?

Yes, undeniably I hope there´s desire in every theorist.

Question: But I understand that it can be a problem when we are speaking about social theory. We are not sure if that is the way things are or if that´s the way we like them to be. That can be considered a very subtle difference but it makes a difference...

There´s a quote which I like from an english novelist called (Farrow/Farell) and he says that what he doesn´t like about intellectuals is their clinical objectivity in the world. And he says, "what I´m looking for among my academic friends and I don´t find it is a passionate objectivity". That´s what I want, and I would never want to get to the stage where the blood in my body is not affected by passions and desires. Even at the moment of clinical objective reading. I think yes I´ll always be driven by my own life history, which is a history of desires and I would not want to sterilize the passion in my science ever. But if it led me to ignore what I saw, if desire, like so much theory, led me to ignore what I saw, then I would be worried. But I think I can control my desire enough.

Question: I want to go back a little. You talked about cycles, and waves and levels. At that moment I asked you about the relationship between that sort of thinking and the role that you and other academic colleagues play in educational politics. I think it is difficult to give a single answer because in the last 30 years we can consider different periods, but, can I ask you to speak a little more about the micro, mezzo and macro levels, and the different waves and articulations?

Well I mean the theory of micro, mezzo and macro is not a well developed theory in that sense. But it´s a sense that there is a spectrum of activity and analysis which takes you from the whole macro -if you will- into a much more contestive middle ground which I call the mezzo, where people can be seen to get to down into the micro daily level of people´s actions in classrooms or in (…) The issue for if whether it´s a level of analysis or action, is how far up into that middle ground of policy and of uses of structure of moments of domination, if you will, we can take our activity. And all I was saying, and is not a particularly profound insight, is (whatever) there are periodly different waves. You can see times when action and analysis move much further up that spectrum towards middle ground and higher ground (barriers/areas?) of definition. And how far up the public intellectual is in a sense allowed to go with his or her analysis or action. This is a function of patterns of politics and economics of that time. So that´s all I´m saying really, that there is a kind of cyclical pattern to how far up into the high ground of reform one can get in terms of activity and analysis.

Question: And what is, or was, the rol of academic personnel in face of that kind of cyclical pattern of activity and analysis?

I think, certainly in my own country, England, intellectuals were accepted and expected to play a role in the higher grounds of that spectrum, up into the areas of policy analysis and even government. They were clearly seen as arquitects of policies. And they weren´t just legitimized as to read policies, but were actually active in the frame of the policy –that can be important to prove-. So in periods of liberal governments, expansion, inclusionist politics, it´s clear that the intellectual can play a public role in the definition of some of those middle ground mezzo level policies and practices. That happened I believe in the 60´s and 70´s. The kind of social contract, if you will, between the intellectual classes and the government classes, seemed to me to rupture in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was elected. So at that point, the intellectuals -if you will- returned to the micro cosmic habitus, and were dysinfunctionized from many of the middle ground discussions about new reforms or new national curriculum. In a whole range of very important moments of domination, moments of boundary definition, the intellectuals were not active, and not even close enough to evolve themselves in analysis. Now this is one of the great rediscoveries of power, which is that you can actually evacuate a whole mileu of policy making and structural renegotiation. Which mean that in a sense you silence theory, (whatever) it is subversive or not, because you can´t get inside the room to see what is going on. And of course, as globalization takes place, that closing of the door to both, action and analysis, has become a world-wide movement. Now where that leaves us as, would be, organic intellectuals, global organic intellectuals in a very difficult position, because we´re trying to read the signs of structural renegociation or structural readjustment -I believe is the phrase- from outside the room. So we´re back trying to read trajectories, patterns, global incidences which give us, I think, fairly clear clues as to what´s going on. It means we have less detailed empirical kind of understandings than we once did. And this brings me back to the kind of sequence of theory I was arguing for, which is that the kind of patterns I was arguing for are more difficult at this time than they were. In some ways, I mean, they argue for the kind of grand panoptical theories of the old grand narratives because if you´re not allowed inside the room and you can´t see things in correctly maybe all you´ve got is theory. But I believe it´s not all as black and white as that. I believe you can get a fair bit of evidence from inside the room. Most people, the political parties particularly, are quite keen to talk about their own kind of manuberings and their own power. So a good deal of work can be done in spite of this closure, to understand, to analyze, and indeed to act. And my sense is that we´re probably moving to go back to that point we´ve gone through, a huge moment of triumphalism. You know, a new world order is established, and now is put in place. And at that moment, of course, you´re outside the room. But if my domination-mediation cycle is correct, we are now likely to be moving into a period of mediation. Where the professional classes are to some extent allowed back into the room. Where people that were in the room go back to their original business. And so, once again, we move into that mezzo mediating level.