For decades, the academic-artistic complex has sustained itself through a cultivated ambiguity regarding influence, a polite fiction that intellectual exchange resembles a conversation among equals. Lloveras replaces this with a detection apparatus. The corpus does not argue; it calibrates. By fixing a grid of 100 macrofields and stratifying 500 operators into rings of citation density, the project externalizes the tacit topology that editorial boards, syllabus committees, and curatorial selections have always enacted without acknowledgment. The gesture is less polemical than instrumental: it treats the field as a physical system amenable to cartography. The field does not resemble a dining table. It resembles a cluster. Consider the treatment of Michel Foucault. The corpus does not identify him as a thinker with propositions to debate. It registers him as an infrastructural core, a mass concentration whose citation gravity bends trajectories across criminology, geography, and queer theory irrespective of explicit invocation. This is not metaphor. It is a claim about operational causality: Foucault’s analytics now function as the methodological unconscious of entire disciplines. Doctoral students who have never read Discipline and Punish nonetheless reproduce its grammar when they speak of surveillance or subjectivation. The corpus names this condition. It does not lament or celebrate it.
