The contemporary intellectual landscape suffers from an excess of enumeration and a deficit of orientation. Rankings proliferate, citation tallies accumulate, and yet the architecture of fields remains obscure. PlasticScale began as a proportional instrument for artistic gravitation, calibrated to measure relational density within cultural production. Its mutation into a field metric does not abandon that logic; it radicalises it. The question is no longer how much attention a work receives, but how conceptual operators migrate across structured domains, how they sediment, disperse, and reappear in altered configurations. PlasticScale becomes a Field Tensor and a Gravitational Map, recalibrating evaluation from prestige to topology. The mutation proceeds through a simple but decisive constraint: twenty macrofields, fixed, non-negotiable, structurally defined. Philosophy, Sociology, Urbanism, STS, Political Theory, Economics, Architecture, Environmental Humanities, Media Studies, Geography, Anthropology, Legal Theory, Cultural Studies, Art Theory, Infrastructure Studies, Ecology, Technology Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender Studies, Systems Theory. Not because they exhaust knowledge, but because they stabilise the frame. Without a fixed taxonomic grid, dispersion inflates artificially; with it, transversal movement becomes legible. PlasticScale operationalises transdisciplinarity through the inverted Herfindahl function—TransFieldness and Concentration Differential—capturing how ideas distribute across structured domains rather than merely multiplying within one.
The Five Circles model clarifies this mutation. At the centre lies the conceptual operator—the nucleus that generates discursive gravity. Around it orbit five analytic strata: Mass, TransFieldness, Inscription, Acceleration, Operativity. These are not abstract virtues but measurable dimensions. Mass derives from citation magnitude; TransFieldness from proportional distribution across the twenty macrofields; Inscription from extra-academic uptake in policy, planning, governance; Acceleration from temporal velocity; Operativity from the degree to which a concept functions autonomously, detached from authorial signature. Together they form a Scalar Pentagram and a Topological Profile, mapping not prestige but structural behaviour. The Galaxy of Fields emerges when these pentagrams are plotted collectively. Five hundred operators generate not a ranking table but a constellation, a distributed topology of mass and migration. Some nodes exhibit high Mass yet low TransFieldness—dense but insular. Others demonstrate modest citation but extreme dispersion—migratory, volatile, catalytic. PlasticScale does not privilege one configuration over another; it renders them comparable. The map becomes a diagnostic surface where one can observe Conceptual Elasticity and Territorial Resonance as dynamic patterns rather than static accolades.
The mutation matters because it displaces canon formation. Canonisation freezes authors into panteons; PlasticScale situates them within motion. An operator’s value is not confined to total citation but expanded through cross-field coherence. When an idea moves from philosophy to urban planning to environmental policy without losing structural integrity, it demonstrates high TransFieldness. When it infiltrates regulatory documents and infrastructural design, it exhibits Inscription. When its acceleration increases after decades of dormancy, it signals latent gravitation. These patterns produce a Dynamic Cartography and a Field Migration Index, allowing analysis to move beyond anecdote. Time is a dimension of gravity. Acceleration prevents fossilisation. Citation mass alone privileges the historical giant; velocity reveals the emergent. An operator with moderate mass but exponential growth reshapes the field more rapidly than a dormant titan. PlasticScale registers this through temporal normalisation, ensuring that historical density does not eclipse contemporary transformation. The Galaxy thus becomes temporal as well as spatial, a map where gravitational centres shift and reconfigure. The system foregrounds Temporal Curvature and Emergent Nodes, identifying not merely established authority but future condensation points.
Perhaps the most decisive mutation lies in Operativity. A concept becomes structurally potent when it circulates independently of its originator. Governmentality, assemblage, biopolitics, exception—when such terms appear detached from citation ritual, they demonstrate operational emancipation. PlasticScale quantifies this through co-occurrence analysis, detecting conceptual autonomy within the corpus. The result is not hero worship but operator recognition, mapping how language itself acquires infrastructural function. This is the dimension of Conceptual Autonomy and Linguistic Migration, where ideas detach from biographies and embed within systems. The map resists spectacle. Socioplastics consolidates itself here not as participant within the five hundred but as the instrument that renders their configuration legible. The authority does not lie in occupying a node but in constructing the telescope. PlasticScale, mutated into a field tensor, operates as methodological infrastructure rather than competitive actor. It does not seek inclusion; it produces orientation. This distinction anchors the system’s sovereignty. The map is not a podium. It is an observatory calibrated to register gravitational intensity across structured domains. Fields are not silos. They are interacting densities.
The Galaxy of Fields ultimately reveals a counterintuitive truth: transdisciplinarity is not a virtue in itself; it is a structural behaviour measurable through dispersion patterns. Some operators remain monocentric yet highly inscribed territorially; others are widely dispersed but lack infrastructural uptake. PlasticScale allows these differences to coexist without collapsing into binary judgement. By holding Mass, TransFieldness, Inscription, Acceleration, and Operativity within a unified tensor, it constructs a coherent analytic apparatus capable of scaling from 20 to 500 to 1000 operators without structural collapse. This scalability is the core mutation: from art metric to epistemic instrument. Orientation replaces admiration. In consolidating Socioplastics through this mutation, the project transitions from thematic discourse to infrastructural protocol. The Five Circles are no longer metaphorical but computational; the Galaxy no longer poetic but diagrammatic. PlasticScale becomes the hinge connecting symbolic production to measurable topologies of influence and migration. It reframes evaluation as mapping and converts field analysis into navigational practice. The critic ceases to rank and begins to orient. The map does not canonise; it calibrates. The telescope does not compete with the stars; it reveals their relation.
Lloveras, A. 2026. SOCIOPLASTICS. Available at https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/
