Parallel paths: Binary conceptions of the social in the study of motorway infrastructures

Motorway infrastructures are fundamental to the organized movement and metabolic reproduction of contemporary societies. They are inextricably entwined with globalizing economies, as they are integral for road freight or a prerequisite for mass car ownership. Given their centrality, motorways have been extensively studied; however, dominant research often reduces the social construction of these systems to partial insights. Within “objectivist orthodoxies,” motorways are treated as delineable technical systems serving a pre-defined economic logic. Conversely, “ethnographic subjectivisms” challenge these orthodoxies by focusing on everyday practices. Yet both approaches isolate the motorway either as a static entity or as a mere matter of individual perception, thereby obscuring the internal relations between state and capital. To offer a more comprehensive conceptualization, I draw on a dialectical methodology. I argue that motorways must be understood as a concrete universal, a socio-material system practically produced within capitalist social relations and a global network of nation-states. Accordingly, local practices are neither independent of these structures nor strict reflections of them; instead, they constitute a field of metabolic struggle where the violence of capital and statehood can be revealed and challenged.