CHAPTER 3 
mediation is the message
Interview with Ivor Goodson by Daniel Feldman and Mariano Palamidessi. Published (in Spanish) in Revista del Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación, Año IX, No 17. Buenos Aires, December 2000.

QUESTION: We found very interesting your idea about the ‘crisis of positionality’ and the way in which this processes can change the sense of our practices and discourses... 
IVOR: Let me give you an example. The National Health service was a democratic invention, in 1945, of the Labour government where the rich and the poor were in beds together, waited on by nurses, and my wife use to be one of those nurses, who could give equal treatment, in the same room, to rich and poor. So it was a democratic health service. But since the conservatives took over in 1979, with Thatcher, the health service has been transformed into a privatised situation: the rich in one room or in a different hospital, the poor in other hospitals. So my wife, even if she’s in the same hospital, her work has been repositioned. She’s either now just serving the rich, or the poor. But I mean, she’s no longer dispensing democratic health care, equal to all, and inclusive. She’s just giving second rate health care, reduced health care, underfinanced health care to the poor people. So even though she believes the same things, she’s in the same hospital ward, with the same beds, her work has been repositioned. And that’s the crisis of positionality. We haven’t changed, our own identity, our own beliefs, our own ideology, our own personal project is the same, but it’s been repositioned. We can hold on to our own beliefs, but if we do not contest structural change, we are repositioned, in spite of our beliefs.
QUESTION: And how do you see the impact on the curriculum theory? 
IVOR: I think it’s very similar. Let’s change the map again so, the year is 1965, I’m teaching in a complementary school, the room is full of rich children, poor children, children with high academic ability, children with less defined academic ability. We teach them all equally, we attempt to create an inclusive pedagogy. And it’s a mixed ability classroom. Now, if I were in the same classroom, the rich would have gone away to a private school, the middle class would have gone to a charter school, I would be left in a school essentially for the poor in the wrong part of town, with less resources. I would still be believing in the same things, still believing in democratic schooling, still wanting to include everybody, but everybody wouldn’t be there.
QUESTION: But the questions are if our beliefs are the same or they have been changed, and if we shall support in a political way our own beliefs and how 
IVOR: Whether our beliefs are the same? I suppose when I say our beliefs are the same, I mean our big beliefs. For example, that you treat everybody equally or that everybody has equal power. Our big beliefs remain the same, but our strategic responses have changed. As I said to you, the belief in progressive pedagogy was the correct belief in the early sixties, because inclusive possibilities were there. So our belief was equal to our position. Now our position have change. We have to adapt the belief in some way. Actually the big belief is the same, the aspiration is the same, to treat everybody equally, but because of the substantial repositioning, there are two different ways to respond. I’m mentioning here (Briend)’s distinction between pre-figurative politics and strategic politics. The strategic politics is: you take a new situation and you work out a way in which your beliefs are reactivated in the new situation. You find a new way to speak about what you believe in. And that may mean changing your strategic position on, say, progressive pedagogy. We are not talking about changing our beliefs. I don’t think we can talk about changing our beliefs. We are saying: at this moment that doesn’t work anymore. But that’s a strategic point, not an ideological point, and that’s a very important distinction. Strategically we are saying, “It’s no good any more”. That wouldn’t deliver the belief by now. So he said: there are two ways that you do politics in a situation where you don’t like your positionality. One is you invent a new strategic politics, you involve yourself in some way in contesting the things that are creating a bad position. And he says the other possibility is what he calls pre-figurative politics, where you find, once again, a room or space where all of those things that you believe in can be done. So you bring together all the different children in one room, all the different students in one room. And just in that room you do what you believe, for example, that you should deal equally with everything. Let’s see a simple situation: you have a lecture, and there are all sorts of people in a lecture, people from different races and different classes come to the lecture. And at the front the professor is sitting, the professors ask most of the questions, but you deliberately disrupt the (...) of the room by asking to the class, by asking somebody in back what they think. You bring in, you include all the people in the room. In some symbolic way, the janitor comes and you thank him for your coffee, you speak to him in front of everybody. You’re doing pre-figurative politics in that moment by saying “what I believe in is to include everybody in the room, and I’ll make sure that if somebody is making a special claim for privilege, I’ll disrupt now: “thank you professor for your prestigious question, what do you think at the back?” That is, just in a moment, trying to do pre-figurative politics. You can be more substantial than that, you can try and create that room permanently, but that’s pre-figurative politics, where you’re showing people “this, in this moment is what I believe about the world”. So that’s different in a way from strategic politics, that’s saying this is my honest belief, this is how I deal with people, I believe in all to be equal, and in second stage it means that you act equally with them. So it’s a daily politics.
QUESTION: Then, when we are speaking about pre-figurative politics, are we speaking also about micro politics? 
IVOR: Let’s think about three levels: macro, mezzo and micro. Strategic politics, from my point of view, moves as far up from the micro as it can go. If you remember I talked about those waves going up towards the macro, when you get a substantial social movement, you move into de media and up towards structure. Let’s put an example. You move from the classroom up into the world of politics definition, talking as you do with the Educational Department about education policies, about distribution and resources. And there you’re involving yourself closer to issues of structure and distribution in strategic politics. It’s not just about micro activity, this is about contesting how resources are given to other people’s activities. That’s strategic politics. And you push it up as far through the mezzo to the macro as you can in any one point of time. Obviously the further up you get, so to speak, the more distributional effect you are having. So that’s not micro, not in the way I understand strategic politics. I’ll go as far as I can up in that debate. And I will cut my arguments as best as I can to achieve what I want. That’s strategic politics. It’s different from pre-figurative politics and actually doing the daily activity, which is honest and truthful. There’s a distinction between truth and strategy. Strategy involves some dishonesty.
QUESTION: Why do you think that?
IVOR: Well, because to persuade a corrupt person to do something, an honest argument won’t work. You may have to be quite cunning, shall we say. Not dishonest maybe, but cunning to persuade a corrupt person to do something that’s good. So that’s the distinction between truth and strategy. Speaking truth the power doesn’t know what helps the powerless. So the old idea of speaking truth with power that’s one way, but another way is a much more manipulative and rather slippery kind of strategic politics. I believe that’s what the moment demands. 
QUESTION: As we understand your point, strategic politics implies a certain knowledge of the social cycles in order to make decisions. Is the role of the intellectual read the tendencies? 
IVOR: There are many potential roles. But the ideal role of the intellectual, I mean, there are many things, but one of them is to understand trajectories, to understand what social political trajectories at the moment are. And to read those particularly in the moment. I said, as I talked with you about pedagogy, that the kind of trajectory which I see there is that student demand is finally going to be celebrated. The trajectory of student pedagogy, looked at historically, implies always resistance to it. Suddenly there is no resistance and no one asks why. But the trajectory of economic change implies that at this moment this has more to do with actually selling postgraduate courses, and celebrating student demand is a way of, in a way, forcing universities to do it. So that’s reading a trajectory at a moment, and arguing. Otherwise, you get what’s happened in both of the conversations I’ve had in Argentina, which is people making timeless arguments, excited arguments about the introduction of pedagogy as a science now. And being very excited by it. In a way, I must say, to some extent I guess it is. But the question I have to make is “OK, but, why now?” And the “why now” is an analysis to do with the understanding of trajectories of this point in time, to do with the coming privatization of many courses in Argentinean universities, which make, suddenly, student demand enormously desirable to groups that have resisted it for decades. So, let’s go back to your reformist politics, let’s look at the reformist moment in 1918. The University of Cordoba, a university founded in 1610 by the Jesuits, in 1918 becomes the centre of the reformers which is, in a way, the celebration of student demand. Usually resisted by all the groups we would expect to resist it, celebrated by the progressive groups we would expect to be supportive of it. Move the reform moment forward, from 1918 to 1999, you find the groups in favour of student demand to be precisely the groups that were once opposed to it. The reason is, obviously, that that fits with, now, suddenly, marketisation and repackaging of education into a series of financial commodities to be sold. Suddenly, student demand is the way to make sure that university professors and others do that with their courses. So that’s how you read history on trajectories against the moment. Or you could just make a series of philosophical arguments. In a sense some of my Argentinean colleagues were just making them when they said: “this is really exciting, finally, power is listening to arguments about pedagogy”. That can be an example of a strategic reading by an organic intellectual of the situation. Which would lead you to think differently it as opposed to the timeless philosophical analysis of the argument of pedagogy, which is a strong argument, I believe in it, I’ve always believed in it. But the situation in 1918 is totally different from the situation in 1999. And that gives an important clue to the fact that powerful groups are finally supporting the argument of pedagogy, whereas one figures the question of “why now”, “what’s happening”, is a crucial intellectual question.
QUESTION: What you say leads us to one question - how can we think against the particular thought that dominates a specific moment?
IVOR: 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 own 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 its 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 pre-figurative 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. 
IVOR: 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 analyse 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.
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.
IVOR: 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 belief about the power of celebrating mediation and no domination is not a touch of desire?
IVOR: 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...
IVOR: 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?
IVOR: 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 periodically 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 role of academic personnel in face of that kind of cyclical pattern of activity and analysis?
IVOR: 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 architects 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 dysinfunctionised 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 milieu 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 renegotiation 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 manoeuvrings and their own power. So a good deal of work can be done in spite of this closure, to understand, to analyse, 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.
QUESTION: Which clues lead you to that impression? Why can we say that we are going into a new period of mediation?
IVOR: Because I think what becomes very clear with the marketization of education in England is that there are severe limits to how far, for example, business will want to go in running schooling. I think business will probably want to build the buildings and make the profits from leasing out the buildings. So it will manage the buildings possibly in public education. I don’t think it will want to involve itself in the hugely contestive area of education, in the distribution of education. It would be just a too dangerous front line to get into. So my own sense is there will be limits to how far education is actually marketised. And once those limits are realized, the professional groups will have to be brought back in, and allowed back into the room, because after all, they are the ones who know best how to do this. So I think the moment of overreach where such groups thought they could do everything, they could do not just business but culture, that moment of overreach is over. And in terms of culture, much of cultural production, I believe, or some of it anyhow, will be handed back to the professional groups, who will have more degrees of autonomy than they (...). Again, this statement is driven by desire as much as any empirical proof, but I think I sense that happening. Domination doesn’t normally go on, on an everyday basis, that would be very hard to stand. And only works in these moments of triumphalism, and it has clearly been a huge moment of history triumphalism. That’s passing away now. So I think we’re moving into a mediation period, where all of the things I’ve talked about become possible. 
QUESTION: Perhaps we can think that each cycle leads to some expected results and some unexpected results. And the unexpected results open the new cycle , let's say, the mediation cycle.
IVOR: Yes, absolutely right.
QUESTION: And what do you think is the role of curriculum theory and the situation of curriculum theory within this period?
IVOR: Again, this is my empirical reading and it goes against my desires. My desires are that curriculum theory will remain vivid and vital and vigorous. My reading of it, is that it has becomes marginalized and meaningless. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that it was a space. The argument of the curriculum as a space where arguments about inclusion or social exclusion could take place, arguments about pedagogy could take place. Where, in a situation of democratic schooling, really important debates could place. If you move from that period of democratic schooling into the period narrowing, vigorously partitioned separated, segmented marketplaces of schooling, where there are some schools for the rich and some for the poor and some for the middle class, the argument of the curriculum is a much less central distributional argument than it was in the 60’s and 70’s. Curriculum theory has been repositioned as a set of marginal arguments about inclusion and exclusion. So the big arguments are arguments about the nature of schooling and the distribution of schooling, not about the nature and distribution of curriculum. I spent 20, 25 years writing in curriculum theory. But most of my last 10 years has been making that move from a specific interest in curriculum into a wider understanding of the new patterns of schooling emerge. So, with regret, I would say the curriculum theory is likely to be less interesting. With the new reforms you've got a lot of writing about implementation. I talked about implementationism, my opinion, which is implementation is short-sightedness among a lot of English theorists. And that’s just implementing what has been decided as structural readjustment. That’s not what curriculum theory should be about, but it’s what it’s become. It is no longer a field that deploys major arguments about a nation’s schooling as it once was. So I am disappointed and distressed about the state curriculum theory, but one moves on. It was a central milieu; it is now a marginal milieu.
QUESTION: In our conversations you use the word “battle'. You were speaking about the battle of curriculum, and the battle of democratic education. And since you speak about battle in curriculum, you speak about theory battle...
IVOR: It’s back to this issue about passion or objectivity. I think that one of the things that most disappoints me the most about intellectuals is the kind of dissected, dispassionate withdraw from the world which is almost a plastic common-sense image of the intellectual, as someone who sits on the computer 14 hours a day and (hits) in his theories, and never goes outside, and fights that battle just in a textual way. And I used the word battle again. I think it’s a much more passionate game, I mean I think what keeps us alive as human beings and afterwards intellectuals, human being first, intellectuals second, is a passionate engagement with the issues. That’s what puts the light in people’s eyes. And you look around at any colleague, and there’s an absence of fire. Is that true or not
QUESTION: Listening to you I realize that I have thought about “battle” in a different direction and I ask myself about the meaning of what you call the process of refraction...
IVOR: Refraction really, it’s in a sense another word talking about mediation, isn’t it? So let’s give an example of refraction, a global example. Perhaps we can give a concrete example. So, the big global force is coming to Argentina. And they legislate a number of changes that Argentinean education must adopt, a number of reforms in the new government, promises through the new minister that the new reforms will be put in place in Argentina. That’s the beginning of the promise, the beginning of structural readjustment. The promise is made, the deal is made. The money comes forward. That’s only the beginning though. The process of refraction or mediation led by. At some point the agreed structural readjustment has to be handed over to ministries, and professionals and intellectuals to be negotiated and battled over. And in that battle, what was an initial intention will be refracted into a so called policy parameters and activities. And in that refraction, there will be a displacement between the original agreed structural readjustment and intentions and the actual policies and activities and parameters that are defined, and in that moment of refraction, in that moment of mediation, in that moment of battle, if you will, between particular forces, that is the moment of understanding. Not the moment of structure intention. And not the moment of final activity, but the battle over interpretation mediation refraction of the original intention. That’s how, that’s the process -in my view- which power goes through when it issues a dominating embark for structural adjustment. That’s the intention, but that’s not what comes out in the end. What comes out in the end changes in each national situation or in each context. For example, if the headmaster of the school drives the same kind of structural readjustment, and he will abolish subjects (or what turns up?), that will be played out differently within each department of the school, each subject, each micro-world inside the school will refract the headmaster’s dominant intervention. And it will be a mediated battled over and it will come out differently. So social life and social activity is always a process of refraction. Not just from one to the other, but through a number of levels. You can go from macro structural adjustment announcements, through to the most minute habitus. And the refraction (…) continue through the various levels. So that the actual habitus which comes out, as you said, you may have a very unintended habitus coming out from a dominant proclamation. Very likely anyway. So the task of the analyst is to understand the process of refraction. If you will, the series of battles and micro politics that go on after a structural intervention. That’s our task. Not to understand the structural intervention only, but to really understand processes of social refraction. 
QUESTION: I guess that the use of an idea like “refraction” can be appreciated only if you ground it in a certain context
IVOR: It’s about the difference between curriculum as I understand it in Spanish speaking countries and in England. The reason for the celebration of curriculum in Anglo American world I think is that it’s most powerfully a celebration of the substantial professional authority. Teachers in the 60’s and 70’s in England and America had a very substantial power of refraction, if you will, of mediation. Because they could control large aspects of the curriculum. So, to go back to the macro, mezzo and micro thing on the role of the intellectual, the intellectual was excited by that because here was an example of substantial movement into the areas of policy and structural renegotiations. The teachers were involved and so the theories were celebrated in a sense (of agency). Now that’s different from Spanish speaking notions of curriculum, that’s a much more specific definition as a course of study.
QUESTION: Now speaking about curriculum theory is the celebration of, probably, the state 
IVOR: That’s entirely true, and that’s a crucial point of that. But you see, we talked about coming back and you’ll go out to the circle and you’ll come back to the same point. The Anglo American world has now returned to the same point as the Spanish world again, which is that now the curriculum is simply a course of study. But, to talk about curriculum is nearly to think about power. And to theorize over curriculum is to theorize on the refraction of power. So we move into a situation of convergence between the Spanish speaking and the English speaking world. It’s interesting to think, to see the convergence, the global convergence in Spanish speaking and English speaking understandings of curriculum. For a little while Anglo American escapes for a wider space which made this a very interesting curriculum theory. Now curriculum returns to one small part of the area. What we’ve got to try and find is an understanding of the world matrix of schooling. Have the bits put together of the patterns of distribution. So we need a theory of school distribution. We need a new distributional theory, a new theory of regulation. Because the game has changed we need to understand the new patterns of regulation and mediation. Putting in place the new marketised matrix of education requires a new kind of analysis to understand these new patterns of regulation and mediation.