The critical posture has exhausted itself. For decades, the art of interpretation pretended to stand outside its objects, judging from a clean space that never existed. Socioplastics abandons this theater. It does not propose another hermeneutic system, another framework for reading texts or images or cities. It proposes something more radical: the construction of instruments that make visible the gravitational fields already operating beneath the noise of critical claims. The shift is from speaking about the world to building tools that register how the world speaks through those who claim to speak about it. The history of thought is a history of telescopes. Galileo did not refute Aristotle through better argument; he built a device that revealed moons Aristotle could not have seen. The telescope did not debate the naked-eye cosmos—it rendered that cosmos obsolete by making visible what was always there but inaccessible. Socioplastics occupies this position. It does not evaluate theoretical claims; it measures their orbital density, their capacity to attract subsequent claims, their half-life in the discursive atmosphere. The instrument does not care whether a theory is true. It cares whether the theory moves.
The first task of the observatory is self-calibration. From a manually curated corpus of five hundred authors—the visible universe of contemporary critical thought, from Foucault to Haraway, from Latour to Tsing—a power law distribution emerges. A tiny fraction of operators hold the majority of mass. The curve decays exponentially. This is not speculation; it is the mathematical signature of any system where attention concentrates. What follows is a cosmology. Eight concentric rings, each with its own density, each with its own function.
The Core holds ten operators averaging six hundred thousand citations. Sixty percent of all mass. These are the inescapable suns: Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, Latour, Haraway. To write in their fields without orbiting them is impossible. They define the syntax of contemporary thought. The Inner Ring holds twenty operators at one hundred thousand average. Twenty percent of mass. Planetary bodies that shape local systems while orbiting the core. Castells, Sassen, Žižek, Haraway's companions. The Visible Ring holds thirty operators at fifty thousand average. Fifteen percent of mass. Bright asteroids, visible to the naked eye, each with its own trajectory. Braidotti, Morton, Tsing, the generational anchors.
The Threshold Ring holds forty operators at ten thousand average. One percent of mass. Here mass becomes detectable. Bodies that are visible but faint, their gravity measurable only at close range. The Debris Ring holds one hundred operators at nine hundred average. One percent of mass. Fragments, individually small, collectively present. The Diffuse Ring holds three hundred operators at three hundred average. One percent of mass. Particles that register statistically but not individually. The Halo Ring holds forty-five hundred operators at twenty average. One percent of mass. A scattered disk, individually invisible, collectively a haze. The Dust Ring holds ninety thousand operators at one average. One percent of mass. Cosmic dust. They exist. They teach. They publish. They leave no gravitational trace.
Sixty bodies hold ninety-five percent of the mass. Ninety-nine thousand nine hundred forty bodies share the remaining five percent. This is not injustice. It is gravity. The Gini coefficient of this distribution is 0.98. For context, standard bibliometric studies report Ginis between 0.70 and 0.90 for most academic fields. Your model registers an extremity closer to the wealth distribution of the most unequal global economies or the concentration of hits in the music industry. This is not a flaw. It is a design feature. You are not conducting a census. You are building a telescope. A standard bibliometric distribution includes everyone who has ever published. Your instrument focuses on the brightest bodies—the operators whose gravity actually shapes the field's topology. Foucault is the Beatles. Butler is Madonna. Latour is Bowie. The super-elite of a specific transdisciplinary formation, mapped at sufficient resolution to reveal their actual structure.
The instrument's name is PlasticScale. Five dimensions, not one. Mass is baseline gravitational pull. Dispersion measures capacity to migrate across twenty fixed fields—philosophy, sociology, geography, STS, urbanism, the territories that constitute the intellectual landscape. Inscription tracks presence outside academia: appearances in policy documents, urban plans, legislative texts, the sites where concepts actually land. Acceleration distinguishes fossils from live operators, measuring recent citation growth. Operativity registers when a concept circulates without its author's name—when "biopolitics" no longer requires Foucault, when "assemblage" travels without DeLanda. Each operator receives coordinates in this five-dimensional space. Not a ranking. A position. The observatory thus replaces the critic with the cartographer. The critic pronounces on quality. The cartographer traces the distribution of effects. This is a profound demotion of the critical ego. It is also an emancipation. Freed from the burden of evaluation, you can attend to what actually happens when thought enters the world: its trajectories, its collisions, its condensations, its dissipations.
The twenty macrocampos provide a fixed coordinate system. Every operator's work distributes across them. Every operator's dispersion score is therefore comparable across the entire population of five hundred. The galaxy is not static. Operators migrate between fields as concepts are appropriated by adjacent disciplines, as new generations rediscover old sources. Acceleration and operativity together measure migration velocity. Beyond the five hundred lies an estimated population of approximately ninety-five thousand additional scholars active in the same broad fields. Their citation averages are inferred from known distributions: forty-five hundred at twenty citations, ninety thousand at one. Summing all rings yields a total mass of approximately ten million citations distributed across roughly one hundred thousand scholars. The numbers are not exact. They are close enough to navigate. What emerges is a landscape both familiar and newly legible. The core is inescapable—sixty bodies whose gravity shapes every trajectory. The rings beyond are statistically significant but individually invisible. The dust is everywhere and nowhere.
This is not a pantheon. It is an operational topology. The instrument does not worship the bodies it tracks. It registers their positions, their masses, their migrations, their inscriptions. It makes no claims about their value. It only shows where they are and how they move. The observatory's sovereignty is the sovereignty of access. PlasticScale does not dictate which operators deserve attention. It shows where attention has actually gone, with what intensity, across what distances, through what media. This is not a prescription. It is a condition of possibility for any prescription that claims to know the field it addresses. The critic becomes telescope-maker. The gallery becomes observatory. The artwork becomes the entire conceptual universe, mapped at sufficient resolution to reveal its actual structure. We see approximately one hundred thousand scholars, roughly ten million citations. The visible universe is five hundred bodies: a core at sixty percent, two bright rings, and five faint rings of debris, halo, and dust. This is enough to navigate.
Lloveras, A. 2026. SOCIOPLASTICS. Available at https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/
