Explain each of the following concepts by discussing examples drawn from lectures and course readings

Representation

Collective Representation is a term introduced by Emile Durkheim to refer to a symbol having a common intellectual and emotional meaning to the members of a group. Collective representations reflect the history of the group that is the collective experience of a group over time. They include not only symbols in the form of objects but also the basic concepts that determine the way in which one views and relates to the world.

Collective representation adds to that which we can learn by our personal experience all that wisdom and science, which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries.

Collective representations express collective sentiments and ideas which give the group its unity and unique character. Thus they are an important factor contributing to the solidarity of a society or other social group.

Mediation

Mediation in Marxist theory refers to the reconciliation of two opposing forces within a given society (i.e. the cultural and material realms, or the superstructure and base) by a mediating object. Similar to this, within media studies the central mediating factor of a given culture is the medium of communication itself. The popular conception of mediation refers to the reconciliation of two opposing parties by a third, and this is similar to its meaning in both Marxist theory and media studies. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this mediating factor is capital or alternately labor, depending on how one views capitalist society (capital is the dominant mediating factor, but labor is another mediating factor that could overthrow capital as the most important one).

To give a concrete example of this, a worker making shows in a show factory is not only producing shoes, but potential exchange value. The shoes are commodities that can be sold for cash. In this way, the value of the labor of the worker is the exchange value of the shows he or she produces minus his or her compensation. At the same time, however, the shoes produced have certain social or cultural values as well. In this way, the worker's labor is mediating between the economic or exchange value of the shoes, and their social and cultural, or symbolic value.

Articulation theory

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have further theorized the complexities of mediation through their development of articulation theory, to describe the ways that certain notions become dominant in a culture, given the relative openness of the social in heavily industrialized nations such as the U.S. This openness results in a "non-necessary belongingness" for the various elements of a given social formation, or an indeterminacy to the way that history, culture, economics, or the material world, and social actors come together to form dominant notions.

"...the so-called unity of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be articulated in different ways because they have no necessary "belongingness." The "unity" which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need to necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects."

Under articulation theory mediation becomes a complex, indeterminate process by which social meanings are circulated under the historical conditions of a given culture and social actors take up these meanings or not based on a complex interplay of all the parts of the social whole.

	Created by Jenna Wold about 9 years ago

Note on Race and Racialization, created by Jenna Wold on 15/02/2017.