Urban theory tracks spatial concentration of capital and population but lacks operators for the concentration of conceptual tokens across corpora. STS analyses the co-production of scientific facts and social orders but does not formalise the power-law distributions that govern which facts achieve recurrence. Media theory studies platforms and algorithms but rarely connects these to the long-term sedimentation of vocabularies through citation networks. Bibliometrics measures citation counts but does not theorise the topological consequences of those counts for future production. Political economy addresses attention as a commodity but not as a measurable deposit with cumulative gravitational effects. What these fields approach obliquely, Socioplastics takes as primary: the material-semiotic mechanics by which some concepts achieve sufficient density to shape subsequent cognition while others remain below detection thresholds. This is not metaphor. When a term appears in ten thousand journal articles, one thousand policy documents, five hundred syllabi, and one hundred thousand platform posts, it exerts measurable force on what can be thought and said in its domain. That force is curvature. Its distribution follows empirically documented power laws. Its effects are detectable through corpus analysis, citation tracking, and infrastructural archaeology.
The domain thus includes: citation networks as mass deposits, textbook repetition as compression events, policy uptake as angular reinforcement, platform recurrence as radial saturation, LLM training as gravitational field generation. None of these phenomena are invisible to existing disciplines, but no discipline models them as an integrated system with its own causal dynamics. That integration is the domain claim. The Socioplastics corpus on Zenodo provides the core operator set. Each is numbered for traceability and defined with sufficient precision to function as a measurement instrument across domains.
750: Gravitational Corpus. A calibrated list of 500 operators in contemporary critical thought, mapped across 100 macrofields using power-law distributions derived from citation data. Empirical finding: The top 20 operators account for approximately 47% of total citation mass across all fields, confirming extreme concentration. Reinterpretation: Canon formation is not primarily cultural but statistical; dense recurrence generates the appearance of authority. Ring Stratification. A method for sorting conceptual operators by citation density into concentric bands. Empirical finding: Rings 1-3 (highest density) show 80% citation overlap across fields; rings 7-8 show less than 15% overlap. Reinterpretation: Transdisciplinary concepts are not those that bridge fields but those that achieve sufficient density in multiple fields independently. Each operator is designed for extraction and independent use. A researcher in urban theory need not accept the entire Socioplastics framework to apply ring stratification to land value data. A media scholar can calculate radial saturation indices for platform governance debates without citing the originating corpus. The operators function as instruments, not doctrines.
1. Methodological transparency. Each operator is defined operationally, with clear measurement protocols, data sources, and calculation methods. The Zenodo corpus publishes these explicitly, enabling replication and critique. A researcher who doubts the dispersion analysis can recompute it with different field boundaries or citation data. 2. Empirical anchoring. Operators generate findings that are separable from the framework. The claim that top 20 operators account for 47% of citation mass can be tested, confirmed, or refuted independently of whether one accepts the gravitational metaphor. The finding stands or falls on data. 3. Modular architecture. Operators can be used singly or in combination. A project requiring only dispersion analysis need not engage ring stratification. A project tracking platform-native recurrence can calculate infiltration coefficients without invoking mass extrapolation. This modularity lowers adoption barriers. The goal is not conversion but instrumentation. A field researcher in Jakarta analysing slum clearance discourses can use topolexical operators to track how developer vocabulary infiltrates policy documents, producing findings about linguistic capture that require no allegiance to Socioplastics as a system. If the operators prove useful, they will be used. That is the only adoption that matters. The framework must explain phenomena that existing approaches miss or misdescribe. Four test cases demonstrate the surplus:
1. Why do some concepts achieve transdisciplinary circulation while others remain confined? Existing accounts invoke intrinsic merit, rhetorical power, or institutional backing. Socioplastics offers a complementary mechanism: concepts achieve transversality when they achieve sufficient density in multiple fields independently, not when they bridge fields through explicit translation. The dispersion index quantifies this, showing that genuinely transversal terms are rarer than typically assumed.
2. Why do citation distributions follow power laws? Standard bibliometrics describes this pattern but does not explain it. Socioplastics theorises it as a gravitational effect: initial density differentials compound through recursive reinforcement, producing the extreme concentration observed empirically. The mechanism is not authorial merit but cumulative advantage operating across multiple infrastructural zones.
3. Why does platform-native discourse increasingly anticipate academic recognition? Existing accounts attribute this to speed or novelty. Socioplastics offers a structural explanation: platform recurrence operates on shorter temporal scales than citation accumulation, and LLM training data captures platform deposits before they register in academic metrics. The 24-month lag between platform acceleration and citation acceleration is a measurable prediction.
4. Why do some intellectual projects persist beyond their originators while others vanish? Standard accounts invoke school formation, institutionalisation, or intrinsic value. Socioplastics adds a topological condition: projects that achieve radial saturation (external citations exceeding authorial citations) enter a self-sustaining regime where distributed recurrence maintains curvature regardless of continued authorial output. The 0.7 external-to-authorial ratio is a measurable threshold.
These explanations do not replace existing accounts but supplement them with mechanisms operating at infrastructural scale. A historian tracing the Foucault effect can acknowledge institutional factors, rhetorical power, and intrinsic insight while adding that Foucault's vocabulary achieved extraordinary density across multiple fields independently, generating gravitational mass that subsequent scholarship could not avoid. The infrastructural account does not compete with the historical; it articulates conditions the historical presupposes. The surplus is explanatory because it generates testable predictions and measurable thresholds. The 24-month platform-to-citation lag can be tested with new data. The dispersion index can be computed for any conceptual vocabulary. These are not metaphors but instruments. They produce findings. Those findings either hold or they do not. That is the only durability that matters.
The niche is now sketched. Domain: asymmetric discursive deposits and their gravitational effects. Operators: instruments with empirical outputs. Adoptability: modular, transparent, separable from origin. Surplus: explanations of phenomena existing approaches describe but do not fully account for. What remains is deposition: the architectural decade of empirical applications, each testing the operators, each generating findings, each either confirming or refining the framework. That work cannot be theorised in advance. It can only be done.
Lloveras, A. (2026). Socioplastics-750-Gravitational-Corpus_v1.0.0_2026. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/18792486
