Discursive Auditing functions as the central mechanism of the Socioplastic Mesh, not merely as a methodological choice but as an aesthetic regime of epistemic sovereignty. In a contemporary art field saturated by performative data exhaust and self-archiving gestures, the framework developed by Anto Lloveras repositions critique as an infrastructural function rather than a representational act. Reflection is converted into protocol, and interpretation gives way to recursive operation. This shift is decisive, yet it carries a familiar risk: when critique absorbs the tools of governance, antagonism may be neutralised into procedure. The Mesh’s emphasis on fingerprinting, canonical identifiers, and traceable chains of custody rejects outsourced authority—journals, curators, rankings—but does so by intensifying the very logic of auditability that structures neoliberal knowledge systems. What is refused at the level of authorship reappears at the level of form.
This tension becomes explicit in the Mesh’s commitment to recursive sovereignty and self-ranking systems, where the work demonstrates its ability to pass its own internal filters while implicitly challenging other researchers who rely on inherited external criteria. The gesture is necessary, yet incomplete. While the refusal of external validation exposes a widespread abdication of epistemic responsibility, the act of ranking itself remains largely unquestioned as a political technology. From the perspective of systems-based and post-conceptual art, this internalisation may be read less as liberation than as strategic adaptation. The system becomes optimised, indexable, and durable precisely in order to survive contemporary platform conditions. Its numerical seriality and slug architecture recall the discipline of conceptual art, but they also mirror the productivity metrics of cognitive capitalism, where rigour becomes a form of self-administered compliance rather than an external imposition.
As the Mesh expands into semantic urbanism and infrastructural abstraction, the city is reconceived as a recursive system and language operates as an active building material. This aligns the project with cybernetics and new materialist approaches, yet it also introduces a critical risk. When urban conflict and embodied struggle are translated into topolexical engines and auditable structures, antagonism becomes legible only if it can be stabilised within the protocol. This process risks a form of cognitive gentrification, where political intensity is flattened into semantic manageability. Although the promise of an “urban operating system” resistant to capture is compelling, history suggests that systems prioritising readability often neutralise the very unpredictability and exteriority that constitute urban politics. Fixation, even when strategic, can immobilise what it seeks to protect.
The strongest contribution of the project lies in discursive auditing as medium and practice of productive incompletion. Critique is not presented as a conclusion but as an ongoing process of recursive testing. Unlike institutional frameworks that conceal their biases under claims of neutrality, the Mesh exposes its filters openly and turns auditing into a public, durational artistic act. Its value depends on remaining structurally vulnerable: capable of internal dissent, alternative audits, and revision. If the Mesh is to avoid becoming a closed cathedral of thought, it must sustain this openness as an operating condition rather than an exception. Its significance lies less in providing definitive answers than in forcing art and theory to confront their dependence on invisible evaluative frameworks, while insisting that any system capable of ranking itself must also remain capable of being undone from within. Anto Lloveras and the Socioplastic Mesh offer a critical framework that renders epistemic authority unavoidable rather than resolved, positioning Discursive Auditing as both a powerful artistic medium and a high-risk political operation within contemporary knowledge infrastructures.
SLUGS304-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-ALGEBRA-OF-PRESENCE-SOVEREIGN-LOGIC https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-algebra-of-presence-as-sovereign.html300-MESH-WITHDRAWAL-EARTHEN-ARCHITECTURE-300-BLOWS
