Metabolic legibility designates the capacity of an overabundant corpus to convert accumulation into orientation, thereby shifting archival thought from storage to inhabitation. In this model, the archive is not a passive container but a digestive surface: a dynamic epistemic environment that receives, compresses, prunes, reabsorbs and recomposes its materials without forfeiting navigability. Its force lies in joining three registers too often separated: the archive as material substrate, the field as social-intellectual formation, and infrastructure as the designed system of identifiers, metadata, interfaces, repositories and protocols that enables circulation. The five operations proposed here—digestive archive, scalar grammar, synthetic legibility, latency dividend, and hardened nuclei with plastic peripheries—constitute not metaphors of convenience but operational distinctions. They clarify how intake differs from pruning, how recurrence becomes coherence, how invisibility may function as maturation, and how durable reference-points coexist with experimental volatility. As a case synthesis, platforms such as Zenodo, Figshare, OpenAlex, Wikidata and DataCite exemplify the infrastructural condition in which searchability has outpaced intelligibility: documents can be found, yet not necessarily entered, interpreted or reactivated. The practical consequence is methodological. A corpus must decide what hardens into citable stability and what remains plastic enough to sustain invention. Metadata becomes an interpretive skin, pruning becomes care, and interface becomes pedagogy. Thus archival preservation is neither sentimental nor merely technical; it is political, aesthetic and epistemological. To preserve is to maintain the future conditions under which abundance can still become thought.
