Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 8 Contestation and Capture: Struggles for Symbolic Control

Symbolic infrastructures are not neutral terrains. They are contested fields—arenas of struggle where different construals of reality compete, collide, and consolidate. The fight is not merely over meaning, but over the infrastructures that make meaning durable. To shape a curriculum, a classification system, a canon, a ritual protocol, a digital interface—is to shape the very conditions under which construal becomes possible, recognisable, or enforceable.

Contestation occurs when different social formations seek to re-align symbolic architectures to their own construals. This may be driven by shifts in material conditions, collective identity, epistemological frameworks, or systems of value. The symbolic infrastructure becomes a site of friction—not simply because of disagreement over content, but because of incommensurable construals being projected through the same scaffolding.

Capture, by contrast, is a particular form of consolidation. It occurs when a dominant formation succeeds in locking in its construals by reconfiguring infrastructures to naturalise, obscure, or enforce them. The infrastructural becomes ideological not through explicit argument but through silent design. For example:

• A standardised testing regime may silently embed particular semiotic hierarchies as if they were natural.

• A database schema may preclude the expression of certain social categories by design.

• A content moderation algorithm may encode implicit normative construals into the architecture of communicability itself.

In each case, contestation has been pre-empted: the symbolic infrastructure becomes a mechanism of closure.

But capture is never absolute. Even in the most rigid infrastructures, leakage occurs. Unintended construals proliferate in the margins. Subversion, reappropriation, parody, tactical misuse—these are all ways symbolic systems are re-opened from within.

Contestation can also take the form of parallel infrastructures: new genres, new systems of notation, new protocols for recognition. These may begin as niche or marginal but can grow into full symbolic architectures in their own right—often via networks of alignment not yet visible to dominant frames.

To contest symbolic infrastructure is not merely to offer critique. It is to build alternatives, to render other construals not only possible but infrastructurally liveable.

In the next post, we will examine how such alternatives scale: how symbolic architectures expand, sediment, and propagate across time and space.