Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Cuadernos de Teoría Social brings together texts on the writing of the social. The initial motivation for this issue is twofold. On the one hand, although writing is a central element in both social theorizing and empirical research, it is often treated as something unproblematic and taken for granted. Writing is not simply an exercise in translating thoughts into words, or in visualizing pre-existing ideas by seeking the attentive gaze of an audience; it is a material and socially imbued practice whose process is itself both form and content of our investigations of the social. The inscriptions and traces of writing constitute true echoes of our relationship with the world. That is why writing always constitutes something revealingly difficult. The great achievement of the current scientific paper culture consists precisely in reducing this difficulty through standardized models of writing. Certainly, this facilitates the ability to write as well as increases the volume of textual material at great speed. However, it slowly kills the writing and thus dilutes the echoes of our relationship with the world.  Without these echoes, one has the sensation of reading the same paper over and over again. On the other hand, this issue starts from the realization -whose reminder is always necessary- that the social writes and rewrites itself, in such a way that it possesses and permanently updates its own clause of non-closure. The social is constantly coming back into being, re-articulating the components, relations and metaphors that operate on, in and for its domain. What is interesting, then, is that although this object cannot be grasped once and for all, there are practitioners, researchers and academics who devote a good fraction of their lives to trying to apprehend the multiple facets of the social through writing. Here we seek to make reflective this exercise of capturing the social-scientific profession. The texts in this issue explore the forms and challenges committed to the practice of writing as a means of understanding and describing life in society.