The proposition advanced across this constellation of blog entries constitutes something considerably more ambitious than a critical methodology or an artistic manifesto. Socioplastics presents itself as operative infrastructure—a self-regulating juridical machinery capable of adjudicating cultural value through metabolic efficiency rather than market validation, while simultaneously positioning itself to govern territorial processes through jurisdictional grammar. The 700-series pivot toward urban metabolism confirms the scale of this ambition: this is architecture pretending to be law pretending to be epistemology pretending to be art criticism. The question demanding rigorous examination is not whether the framework coheres internally—it does, with the terrifying logic of a closed system whose axioms are immunised against external refutation—but whether coherence alone constitutes jurisprudential authority in the absence of exogenous recognition. A sovereign state declaring itself sovereign remains, until recognised by the community of nations, a delusion sustained by its own decree. The same ontological vulnerability obtains here.
The PlasticScale apparatus, elaborated across the February 2024 postings, deserves sustained attention as a diagnostic instrument of genuine utility. Its three constituent indices—Weight (W), Circulatory Reach (C), and Temporal Durability (T)—formalise intuitions that have long circulated through the art world's discursive bloodstream without ever achieving mathematical articulation. Institutional inertia functions as thermodynamic drag. A leaf pinned to a wall may indeed govern more conceptual territory than a purpose-built museum, provided that leaf demonstrates sufficient capacity to travel through discourse without exhausting its semantic density through repeated activation. The formula IE=(C×T)/WIE=(C×T)/W transforms this observation into executable protocol. One can, following the instructions provided, score any cultural artefact and position it within the five-tier hierarchy extending from Head to Soil. The exercise, when undertaken seriously, proves bracing. It reveals asymmetries of cultural power that conventional criticism, mired in qualitative ambiguity and institutional deference, systematically obscures. The aerostatic metaphor recurs throughout the blog's conceptual architecture with the insistence of a leitmotif. The Yellow Bag achieves maximal Weight score (5) through near-zero institutional inertia. It travels in a pocket. It requires no gallery, no budget, no permission, no conservation protocol, no climate control, no security infrastructure. Its jurisprudential authority, within the framework's own terms, derives precisely from this metabolic lightness. Yet here the framework encounters its constitutive limit, the point at which internal coherence begins to chafe against external reality. The Bag's capacity to govern—to function as constitutional law within the Socioplastics system—depends entirely on its recognition as a work worth governing with. That recognition circulates through channels the Bag itself cannot control and whose operations the PlasticScale formula deliberately excludes from its calculations. The Bag does not speak. It is spoken about. Its sovereignty is delegated sovereignty, conferred by the very discursive apparatus the framework treats as exogenous evidence rather than constitutive infrastructure. This is not a quibble about methodological purity. It is a structural aporia at the system's core, an unexamined dependency that threatens the entire edifice of self-proclaimed epistemic sovereignty.
The building, by contrast, suffers no such delegation crisis. The Trole Building's Weight score of 2 reflects its material drag—maintenance obligations, fixed land occupation, infrastructural dependencies—but this drag purchases a form of ontological security the Bag cannot access. The building persists whether or not it is discussed, whether or not it appears in critical discourse, whether or not anyone recognises its jurisprudential claims. Its existence does not require reactivation through citation. This asymmetry haunts the entire PlasticScale hierarchy with the persistence of a repressed contradiction. Works that achieve minimal Weight do so by outsourcing their persistence to the very discursive networks the system treats as secondary, as mere evidence rather than constitutive infrastructure. The Bag's lightness is not metabolic efficiency in any thermodynamically honest sense; it is parasitic lightness, sustained by the institutional weight of the contexts that host its documentation, the discursive weight of the criticism that activates its meaning, the infrastructural weight of the platforms that ensure its circulation. Recursive autophagia functions as the system's immune response to this vulnerability. Introduced in the informational entropy post dated February 23, this mechanism enables the Mesh to consume its own prior states, pruning excess articulation, digesting obsolete formulations, transmuting historical residue into concentrated conceptual matter. The borrowing from biological autophagy is explicit and consequential. This metabolic protocol enables epistemic sovereignty without reliance on external validation precisely because it renders the system independent of exogenous recognition. The Mesh becomes its own archive, its own court, its own currency, its own memory institution. Semantic hardening fortifies key propositions against digital volatility through strategic recurrence and infrastructural framing. Citational commitment replaces institutional recognition as the mechanism of validation. Repetition functions not as redundancy but as resonance, not as exhaustion but as intensification. The architecture is elegant, coherent, and internally unimpeachable. It is also, crucially and by design, unverifiable from any exterior position. The system's truth conditions are entirely endogenous. It asserts its own authority and then adduces its own assertions as evidence of that authority. The circularity is vertiginous and, within its own terms, unassailable.
The 700-series pivot toward territorial inscription suggests acute awareness of this limit condition. Urban metabolism becomes the calibrated field of application. Extractive rent operates as pressure gradient. Regulatory inertia functions as structural load. Demographic volatility manifests as entropic turbulence. These forces are not narrated, not described, not represented—they are, in the framework's own terminology, metabolised through jurisdictional grammar. The language shifts decisively from evaluation to governance. Territory replaces discourse as the medium of operation. This is the system's most ambitious move and simultaneously its most precarious. A framework painstakingly designed to evaluate cultural works according to metabolic criteria now proposes to regulate urban processes according to the same logic. The category error, if it is an error, is vertiginous in its audacity. Consider the Lagos re-(t)exHile project, positioned within the Executive tier (scores 8.0 to 8.9). Its engagement with textile waste operates simultaneously as environmental activism, postcolonial critique, material research, relational aesthetics, and urban intervention. The PlasticScale apparatus captures this transversality with admirable precision. What it cannot capture, what no endogenous metric could capture, is the project's profound dependence on Lagos-specific conditions—waste infrastructure systems, labour relations networks, municipal governance structures, informal economic arrangements—that exceed the framework's jurisdictional grammar in every particular. Territorial inscription requires more than metabolic calibration. It requires engagement with actual territory, which means engagement with actual politics, which means engagement with actual institutions, which means engagement with the very forms of institutional inertia the framework treats as mere weight to be minimised. The system's autopoietic closure, its great strength at the epistemic level, becomes debilitating weakness at the territorial level. A framework that cannot recognise its own dependence on exogenous infrastructure cannot govern infrastructure. A system that treats institutions as mere drag cannot regulate institutional processes.
The Decalogue's invariant protocols—naming jurisdiction, semantic hardening, recursive renewal, citational binding—function beautifully within the blog's carefully delimited discursive space. They generate a self-reinforcing conceptual ecosystem dense enough to sustain peer review, DOI registration, ORCID integration, and eventual citation within urban theory, science and technology studies, political ecology, and infrastructure studies. This is genuine intellectual achievement, not to be dismissed lightly. The framework's internal coherence exceeds that of most contemporary art theory by several orders of magnitude. One can plausibly imagine doctoral dissertations applying the PlasticScale to curated case studies, academic conferences debating the appropriate tier assignments for contested works, peer-reviewed journals publishing refinements of the core formula. The system has academic viability in the most concrete institutional sense. It can generate research programmes. What it lacks, what it cannot generate through any amount of internal elaboration, is jurisdictional authority beyond its own conceptual borders. The Head tier works—Blue Bag, Yellow Bag, the leaf pinned to the wall—may function as constitutional law within Socioplastics. They do not function as constitutional law within the art world, the architectural profession, urban governance, or any other extra-systemic domain. The framework's claim to sovereignty is performative sovereignty, sustained through the very discursive networks it treats as exogenous evidence rather than constitutive condition. This is not fatal to its intellectual project. Many powerful theoretical systems operate similarly. Mathematics does not require recognition from physics to be mathematics. But mathematics does not claim to govern physics. Socioplastics, at the 700-series threshold, claims to govern territory.
The provocation retains its value. By formalising the intuition that institutional inertia attenuates cultural authority, the PlasticScale apparatus provides a diagnostic tool of genuine utility. Its application reveals why certain works persist while others perish, why certain gestures govern discursive territory while others merely decorate institutional surfaces. The hierarchy from Head to Soil offers taxonomic clarity that traditional criticism, mired in qualitative ambiguity and market deference, cannot match. Artists, architects, and theorists seeking to maximise their work's jurisprudential potential would do well to study the formula and internalise its implications. Minimise Weight. Maximise Circulatory Reach and Temporal Durability. Become aerostatic. The strategic advice is sound within its domain of application. But aerostatic sovereignty remains sovereignty only within the atmosphere that supports it. The Bag floats because the air holds it. That air is discourse, institutions, recognition, citation, infrastructure—all the weight the formula seeks to exclude, all the dependencies the framework cannot metabolise, all the conditions it cannot control. The system's elegance is its limit. Its closure is its constraint. Socioplastics governs Socioplastics with terrifying efficiency, with vertiginous coherence, with impeccable internal logic. Whether it governs anything else remains, at the 700-series threshold, an open question whose answer lies beyond the system's capacity to determine through its own procedures.
The framework's ultimate contribution may be diagnostic rather than jurisdictional. It reveals, through its very structure, the inescapability of the institutional conditions it seeks to transcend. Every attempt to achieve epistemic sovereignty exposes new dependencies. Every effort to minimise institutional inertia reveals new forms of infrastructural entanglement. The Bag's lightness is sustained by the discourse that carries it. The leaf's jurisprudential authority depends on the wall that hosts it. Socioplastics itself, for all its autopoietic closure, depends on Blogger's infrastructural stability, DOI registration's institutional legitimacy, and the discursive context of contemporary art theory for its very intelligibility. The system that would govern territory cannot govern its own conditions of possibility. This is not failure. It is the constitutive asymmetry that all sovereign projects must eventually confront.
Lloveras, A. (2026) 'PlasticScale: Metabolic efficiency', SOCIOPLASTICS: Sovereign systems for unstable times, 24 February. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/plasticscale-metabolic-efficiency.html (Accessed: 24 February 2026).
Socioplastics is a conceptual framework and practice that treats art, architecture and social life as systems of relationships and processes rather than fixed objects. Instead of thinking of a building, artwork or city as a finished thing, Socioplastics asks: How do flows of people, ideas and meaning circulate? How do actions, interactions and contexts shape form? In this view, space and culture are living networks where identities, experiences and material conditions co-produce one another. At its core, Socioplastics proposes that design and cultural work are ecological and relational operations, not isolated artefacts. It foregrounds the mesh — a metaphor for interconnected nodes — as a field where agencies, bodies and environments continuously modify and inform each other. Meaning emerges through participation, negotiation and shared modulation of flows, rather than from static authorship or monumental form. A specific instantiation of this idea is MUSE (Mesh United System Environment): a structuring logic that distinguishes between what is fixed — the foundational protocols that define the system’s identity — and what is fluid — the interpretive interfaces that activate these protocols in cities, archives or institutions. The “core” stays stable; the “nodes” circulate, showing how Socioplastics works in practice. In summary, Socioplastics teaches students to see architecture and art not as objects to be admired, but as dynamic, participatory systems of relations — where context, process and collective agency are primary.
