Page 208 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

SOCIAL FORMATION

offers contradictory representations in which there is both protest and acceptance
by women of their traditional cultural status.
A number of researchers, such as Ang and Radway, have sought to explore why
it is that soap opera has been so popular amongst women. It has been argued that 185
women are active creators of meaning in relation to soap opera and demonstrate a
complex understanding of the genre. Women, it is said, gain pleasure from
representations that chime with their concerns and use them as a part of a social
glue, a topic of conversation within a network of female friends and relatives. The
studies of the genre’s audience played a significant part in the development of the
‘active audience’ paradigm.
Links Active audience, aesthetics, feminism, narrative, realism, representation, text

Social The idea of the social is commonly taken to mean ‘of or in society’, where
society is understood to be an autonomous sphere of activity formed through the
organization of rule-governed human relationships and interactions. However,
many cultural studies theorists influenced by poststructuralism hold the ‘social’ to
have no object of reference. For such writers, the social is not an object but a
discursively constructed field of contestation in which multiple descriptions of self
and others compete for ascendancy.
This argument springs from a critique of essentialism and foundationalism that
rejects the idea of essential, universal concepts such as class, history or society that
refer to unchanging entities in the world. Thus, the ‘social’ is not a proper object
of analysis but a discursive construction of reality. Consequently, ‘society’ is
understood to be an unstable system of discursive differences in which sociopolitical
identities represent the open and contingent articulation of cultural and political
categories.
Thus Laclau and Mouffe argue that the ‘social’ is to be thought of not as a totality
but rather as a set of contingently related aggregates of difference articulated or
‘sutured’ together. Those aspects of social life (identities or nation or society) which
we think of as a unity (and sometimes as universals) can be thought of as a
temporary stabilization or arbitrary closure of meaning. Needless to say, a criticism
of cultural studies voiced by sociologists in particular is that it has collapsed the idea
of the social into the cultural and discursive.
Links Articulation, discourse, foundationalism, poststructuralism, social formation

Social formation The concept of a social formation is analogous to the idea of the
social or society. However, rather than grasping the social as a ‘whole’ or totality it
is conceived of as a concrete historically produced complex assemblage composed
of different practices (ideological, political, economic). A social formation is said to
consist of levels of practice, each of which has its own specificity, that are articulated
together in particular conjunctures where there is no necessary or automatic
correspondence or relationship to each other.
This understanding of a social formation has its origins for cultural studies in
Althusser’s structuralist Marxism of the 1970s that describes the social as constituted