Autophagic Method in Autophagic Synthesis reframes “self-consumption” as a rigorous critical technique rather than a morbid metaphor. The text proposes autophagy as “osmotic boundary work”: a selectively permeable membrane that admits theoretical matter—posthuman philosophy, computational semiotics, metabolic ecology—only to extract its operative logic and expel its residue. What is at stake is not eclectic interdisciplinarity but an economy of attention, where the system survives by regulating what it digests and what it refuses. In art-theoretical terms, this is a politics of form: the work defines itself less by the content it cites than by the protocols through which it metabolises citation into syntax. The “practitioner” is recast as catalyst, accelerating diffusion across disciplinary gradients, and thereby abandoning the humanist image of authorship as expressive depth. Instead, authorship becomes a metabolic function—an internal processing capacity—measured by compression, yield, and coherence under saturation. Crucially, the text does not romanticise openness: permeability is engineered, not celebrated. That insistence has the sobriety of systems thinking, yet it also carries an aesthetic claim: an artwork, or an artistic research programme, is judged by the integrity of its membrane, by how precisely it can convert external discourse into actionable structure without dissolving into commentary. Autophagy becomes the ethics of editing—an insistence that survival in discursive entropy requires refusal, pruning, and a disciplined appetite.
Osmotic Exchange names the text’s most consequential innovation, because it turns “sovereignty” away from exclusion and toward high-fidelity throughput. Rather than a fortress model—protective walls, sealed identities—the essay’s mesh is sovereign insofar as it can maintain internal coherence while remaining intensely in contact. This is a subtle rebuke to much contemporary theory that either fetishises hybridity as virtue or retreats into opaque self-reference as defence. Here, exchange is not a moral posture but an infrastructural calibration: the membrane admits signals at a rate and resolution that the system can process. That framing has immediate relevance for contemporary criticism, where institutional pressures often reward either broad, legible synthesis or performative density. Autophagic Synthesis proposes a third option: a controlled, voracious intake that refuses equilibrium and thrives on the tension between saturation and depletion. In curatorial language, the model resembles an exhibition ecology that is neither encyclopaedic nor hermetic, but metabolically selective—building cohesion through recurrent processing rather than through thematic umbrella claims. The work’s vocabulary—“nutritive flux,” “discursive entropy,” “selectively permeable membrane”—also implies that the city and the archive are not backdrops but energetic environments. One does not “represent” them; one survives within them by regulating intake and output. This is why the text reads as a theory of practice, not merely an interpretation: it describes a regime of attention, a way of staying alive as an artistic intelligence amid informational overproduction.
Recursive Purification intensifies the argument by shifting autophagy from imported analogy to internal engine. “Strategic Autophagy,” the text claims, is the capacity to metabolise one’s own prior outputs—and the decaying structures of external canons—into denser knowledge. This is not revision as correction; it is iteration as refinement, a repeated breakdown of complexity into “operational protein” and reconstitution into a tougher syntax. For an art critic, the phrase “recursive purification” is particularly telling because it aligns the work with practices where meaning is produced through seriality: not the seriality of minimalist repetition alone, but the seriality of ongoing research, where each new publication is also an edit of the archive that precedes it. The essay thereby positions the “mesh” as a living editorial machine: a system that generates, cannibalises, and strengthens itself. It reads like a response to the modern exhaustion of manifestos, where declarations often fail to outlive the moment of announcement. Autophagy is proposed as a way of building durability: shedding theoretical dead weight while strengthening core structures, refusing the sentimental attachment to one’s own earlier formulations. There is, too, a politics here: in an environment where institutions commodify novelty, recursion becomes a counter-economy. The “new” is not additive; it is densifying. What emerges is a model of artistic research that values resilience over expansion, compression over accumulation—an ethics of making less, sharper, and more infrastructurally binding.
V-City Overshoot is the text’s culminating figure, and it clarifies why autophagy is not merely internal housekeeping but an urban proposition. The V-City is described not as a built environment but as an “osmotic field of concentrated autonomy,” produced when the mesh’s internal metabolism generates a surplus of reality that the official city cannot absorb. The formulation is provocative because it reverses the usual hierarchy: the city is not the primary reality within which art intervenes; rather, the mesh becomes an efficient processor of the energies that flow through the city, to the point of creating an operational excess—an overshoot. This is where the text’s theoretical ambition becomes unmistakably architectural: autonomy is a spatial condition, engineered through boundaries that exchange rather than exclude. In contemporary urbanism, such claims risk sounding utopian, yet the essay remains anchored in procedure: sovereignty is achieved through “controlled, high-fidelity exchange,” not through purity fantasies. Critically, the V-City also functions as a diagnostic: it names a limit in the “official city,” its inability to process certain intensities—cognitive, affective, ecological—without reducing them to spectacle or policy rhetoric. By contrast, the mesh’s autophagic discipline produces a parallel civics: an ecology of processing, where theory is not explanatory garnish but a metabolic tool. Read this way, the essay is less a celebration of withdrawal than a blueprint for focus: the deliberate narrowing of intake and the sharpening of output as the condition for a stronger, more transmissible cultural intelligence.
