La comunicazione come formazione percettiva dell’habitus: dal teatro sociale all’ambiente mediale = Communication and the Perceptual Formation of Habitus: From Social Theatre to Media Environments

Abstract

Communication and the Perceptual Formation of Habitus: From Social Theatre to Media Environments. This article proposes a Bourdieusian reinterpretation of communication as a process of perceptual formation of habitus. Rather than understanding communication primarily as the transmission of meanings, the contribution argues that social coordination emerges through practical orientation: actors anticipate what is appropriate within a field through embodied dispositions. Drawing on affinities between Bourdieu’s concept of practical sense and approaches associated with embodied and enacted cognition, the article examines how some media configurations may contribute to making specific social relations perceptually familiar and practically anticipable. To render this process observable, the article compares two formally analogous but medially different configurations: the late nineteenth-century social theatre of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and the Japanese animated series Lady Oscar (1979). Both depict highly hierarchical aristocratic environments, yet they organize the perception of social order differently. In Wilde’s drama, the field appears as a system of publicly legible signs in which reputations, objects and postures guide social classification. In Lady Oscar, by contrast, social relations emerge through spatial and relational configurations that distribute tensions, distances and possibilities of action across the perceptual environment. The article argues that this comparison reveals a broader transformation in the perception of the field: from social legibility to environmental inhabitation. Media are therefore considered not only as representations of the social world, but also as perceptual environments that organize situated forms of orientation. However, this does not imply direct or uniform media effects. Perceptual familiarization is understood instead as a situated process emerging through the interaction between media environments, embodied dispositions and the differentiated trajectories of spectators. The contribution ultimately extends Bourdieusian media theory by showing how contemporary audiovisual forms may render perceptible some of the practical and perceptual conditions through which social coordination becomes possible.