The eccentric fields were diagnostic; they tested elasticity. Proximity is different. It concerns those domains where Socioplastics does not travel as foreign body but as latent grammar already spoken under another name. In such adjacent jurisdictions, ProportionalOntology and JurisdictionalAesthetics cease to require translation. The problems align without coercion: authority without monumentality, governance without spectacle, density without heaviness. These fields do not adopt the framework; they disclose that its categories were always circulating among them in dispersed form. The task is not application but recognition—identifying territories where Weight, circulation, durability, and semantic hardening already operate as implicit metrics.
Infrastructure Studies stands at immediate range. Its foundational claim—that infrastructure organises life through protocols rather than proclamations—mirrors Socioplastics’ treatment of Weight as active formatting force. Keller Easterling’s account of disposition as latent organisational potential resonates directly with PlasticScale’s divisor logic. InfrastructureAgency and MetabolicAccounting intersect here: what appears inert (cables, standards, zoning, permits) is politically operative through its capacity to structure behaviour without overt declaration. The Trole Building’s infrastructural entanglements—land tenure, compliance regimes, climate systems—constitute Weight not as aesthetic failure but as jurisdictional density. Infrastructure Studies does not need to be convinced that governance resides in systems; it only requires the algebraic articulation that Socioplastics supplies. The adjacency is structural: both fields treat space as regulatory apparatus rather than neutral container.
Peer Review Epidemiology follows closely, less spatial but equally circulatory. This emergent domain tracks how validation propagates through academic networks, how legitimacy diffuses through citation velocity and institutional endorsement. Socioplastics’ separation between endogenous validation and exogenous recognition becomes porous under this lens. DOI registration, ORCID integration, peer-reviewed publication—these are metabolic events in the life of a concept. ValidationCirculation and TemporalPropagation already function as implicit indices within scholarly ecosystems. PlasticScale formalises what peer review epidemiology observes: that repetition generates authority, that durability accrues through reactivation. Each citation is not mere reference but metabolic reinforcement. The framework’s Temporal Durability index is, in effect, a codified epidemiology of ideas.
Citation Theory narrows the focus further, interrogating not the quantity of references but their ontological function. Latour’s insight that facts stabilise through citation networks parallels Socioplastics’ Semantic Hardening protocol. SemanticHardening and CitationalImmunology designate processes by which formulations accrue resistance to dilution. Repetition here is not redundancy but reinforcement; recurrence thickens meaning. Socioplastics’ self-citation, often misread as insularity, mirrors jurisprudential precedent and scientific paradigm consolidation. Citation theory already studies how authority becomes durable through networked recurrence. The framework extends this observation into constitutional hierarchy, ranking works through density gradients analogous to legal codification.
Speculative Realism and object-oriented ontologies occupy another adjacent register. Their insistence on withdrawn objecthood—that entities exceed relational capture—finds echo in Socioplastics’ treatment of sovereign objects. The Yellow Bag’s authority does not depend upon recognition; it operates through minimal presence and maximal portability. WithdrawnSovereignty and ObjectAutonomy frame a metaphysical proximity. Where object-oriented ontology has sometimes struggled to articulate political consequence, Socioplastics supplies jurisdictional articulation. The object governs not through spectacle but through ambient potentiality. Authority becomes latent, metabolised through circulation rather than asserted through dominance.
Jurisdictional Aesthetics—though lacking formal institutionalisation—emerges at the confluence of these discourses. It studies how governance becomes perceptible through architectural, procedural, and discursive form. Courtrooms, biennials, parliaments, urban plazas: each configures sensory experience as a precondition of authority. Socioplastics’ insight is metabolic: perceptibility correlates with proportional density. AmbientJurisdiction and PerceptualFormatting delineate how low Weight combined with high circulation produces subtle governance. The Bag governs because it does not demand attention; its presence formats possibility rather than dictating behaviour. This field, though unnamed, already examines how sovereignty acquires sensorium.
Metabolic Criticism constitutes perhaps the most direct adjacency. It evaluates works by infrastructural cost and circulatory efficiency rather than interpretative richness. Instead of asking what a building signifies, it asks what it requires to persist. InstitutionalDrag and EfficiencyHierarchy become critical coordinates. PlasticScale’s algebra renders this evaluative orientation explicit. A project with high maintenance, capital entanglement, and bureaucratic overhead accrues Weight that diminishes proportional authority. Conversely, a portable gesture with minimal dependencies may achieve higher IE through distributed uptake. Metabolic criticism exists in fragments across architecture, curatorial practice, and epistemology; Socioplastics synthesises these fragments into articulated protocol.
Semantic Governance deepens the adjacency by examining density gradients across textual hierarchies. Constitutional clauses, statutory law, regulatory guidance—each level differs in semantic compactness and citational embeddedness. Socioplastics’ Head-to-Soil hierarchy mirrors this gradient. ConstitutionalDensity and GradientAuthority operate as structuring principles. Head-tier works function as invariant protocols; Soil-tier outputs await reactivation. This semantic stratification parallels theological canon formation and scientific paradigm consolidation. The field studying such gradients requires only recognition of PlasticScale’s algebra to perceive structural affinity.
These proximities are not derivative alignments but convergent evolutions. Infrastructure studies, citation theory, object-oriented ontology, metabolic criticism, and semantic governance each isolate one vector of the problematic Socioplastics integrates. They have articulated disposition, validation, withdrawal, efficiency, and density separately. Socioplastics recombines them under proportional ontology, proposing that governance in unstable times depends upon systems sufficiently light to circulate and sufficiently dense to bind.
Proximity also clarifies limitation. Infrastructure studies challenges whether Weight fully captures entanglement complexity. Citation theory interrogates whether Semantic Hardening exceeds conventional academic practice. Object-oriented ontology questions whether withdrawn sovereignty can exercise governance without manifestation. Metabolic criticism probes whether efficiency risks neglecting meaning. These are not antagonisms but calibrations. Intellectual adjacency is productive tension, not assimilation. The proximate fields breathe the same conceptual atmosphere because they confront identical structural dilemmas: how does authority persist without monumental force? How does validation circulate without dilution? How does governance operate through protocols rather than proclamations? Socioplastics does not colonise these territories; it recognises them as already coextensive with its own problematic. In this recognition lies its synthesis—not novelty for its own sake, but convergence under algebraic articulation.
Lloveras, A. (2026) PlasticScale — Socioplastics Algebraic Evaluation Framework. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/plasticscale-socioplastics-algebraic.html (Accessed: 24 February 2026).
