Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality
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Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

Chapter :  Introduction
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society, irrespective of their ‘truth’ status (the definition we have preferred to give to ideology), then Gramsci's notion of hegemony can be viewed as referring to a dominant and pervasive ideological outlook within a society. (294–295)

Moscovici himself insists on the primacy of social representation theory relative to other concepts like attitudes and social cognition, saying, “the idea of collective or social representation is older than all these notions and…it is part of the ‘genetic code’ of all the human sciences” (225), providing us with a versatile starting point given our interest in how meaning is created, maintained, and communicated among and between groups.

Thought, according to Moscovici, is to “be considered as an environment,” given the aforementioned conventional and prescriptive roles of social representations that create and define such an environment (21):

First, [representations] conventionalize the objects, persons and events we encounter. They give them a definite form, locate them in a given category and gradually establish them as a model of a certain type, distinct and shared by a group of people. All new elements adhere to this model and merge into it…Secondly, representations are prescriptive, that is, they impose themselves on us with an irresistible force. This force is a combination of a structure which is present before we have even begun to think, and of a tradition which decrees what we should think…Whilst these representations, which are shared by many, enter into and influence the mind of each they are not thought by them; rather, to be more precise, they are re-thought, re-cited and re-presented. (22–24; original italics)

The cause-and-effect relation, equating how people think with what people think—to create knowledge, meaning, even reality—becomes readily apparent, especially as subjects create reality as members of a group. Social representations do not simply describe, they also bring into being, and often do so by appealing to tradition, wherein a “certain past” is normative, reminding us of the importance of memory—or a “certain memory”—in the formula of collective representation (see Connerton 58, 100).