Relational Infrastructures: Turning Habitus from (dis)Positions in Symbolic Space to Transcalar Sociocognitive Prostheses

According to Bourdieu-Wacquant’s generative structuralism, physical spaces – in the form of built environment, dwellings, workshops and street furniture – as they are divided and hierarchized as a set of oppositional sites, can be envisioned as symbolizing established positions in social space. For, through the inertia of urban infrastructures, a naturalization of social divisions occurs, which gives material strength to historically determined and arbitrary power relations. These are distributed according to a social topology empirically observable and organizable in fields, intended as schematic images displayed by sociological inquiry. That is, as fields represent the objectivated form, of autonomous – but relational – positioning of agents, the “ontological complicity” of practical agency – catalyzed through the incorporation of social disposition in form of habitus/habitat – with the institutionalized set of positions thus hinders a mechanical causation between a “context” and a “consciousness”. Nonetheless, despite the refusal of any essentialism, with this framework dualisms are not completely overcome, since uncertainty remains between autonomy and heteronomy of agents, which is ultimately traced back as a content belonging to a cultural global container. Which is intelligible in symbolic terms only. If, following Latour-Callon perspective, instead to deduce the habitus in this way it was considered as something that must be explained, a risky assembly, adherent and made of material components – the same infrastructures, which are not considered as an inert manifestation of social relations, but literally the mediators which formats these latter – its formation would be subtracted from the determinism of "contextualization", and flattened on its “associated milieu” in a trans-scalar vision. In this way, the formation of habitus as framed subjectivities would not be subjected to all-encompassing abstract social fields, but it would be negotiated with non-human materiality and related agency as sociocognitive prostheses.