Intellectual fields operate not as conversations among equals but as gravitational systems structured by asymmetric concentrations of attention, reference, and discursive density. The distribution of citations across any mature domain reveals a steep power-law function in which a small minority of operators accumulate sufficient mass to curve the trajectory of subsequent production while thousands of contributors remain below the threshold of measurable macro-curvature. This asymmetry is not a failure of democratic ideals but a thermodynamic property of attention economies; bibliometric studies consistently report Gini coefficients between 0.70 and 0.90, indicating that the top percentile of authors routinely capture more than half of all citations. Such concentration is not noise requiring correction but structure requiring legibility. Without gradients of density there is no orientation, no means of distinguishing attractor basins from peripheral drift, no cartography of the forces that actually shape what becomes thinkable within a given disciplinary formation. The task therefore shifts from moral evaluation of inequality to topological description of its configuration: mapping how citation mass distributes across the field, how dispersion across subdomains operates as angular momentum, how recent acceleration distinguishes emergent nodes from sedimented authorities, how inscription into policy and infrastructure indicates capture by institutional gravity, and how certain concepts achieve nuclear autonomy, circulating without further attachment to their originating author. This is not a canon but a concentration field, a region of variable density whose gradient reveals where thought has historically accumulated sufficient weight to bend subsequent trajectories.
From this analytic stance emerges the Core and Five Rings architecture, a stratification derived not from aesthetic preference but from cumulative mass thresholds within a manually curated corpus of five hundred operators spanning philosophy, sociology, urban theory, science and technology studies, political ecology, infrastructure studies, gender theory, postcolonial critique, and adjacent domains. The Core constitutes the zone of maximum density, a small cluster whose citation volume exceeds six hundred thousand per operator, capturing approximately sixty percent of total mass within the sample. These are not the most insightful or original contributors by any hermeneutic standard; they are simply the bodies whose accumulated citation mass has reached sufficient magnitude to function as structural attractors, nodes that cannot be circumvented without incurring significant navigational cost. The first ring, comprising twenty operators with citation averages near one hundred thousand, forms a planetary belt whose angular momentum stabilizes the local system while remaining within the gravitational influence of the Core. The second ring, thirty operators near fifty thousand, constitutes the luminous zone where density remains high enough for macro-visibility but no longer determines the topology of distant regions. The third ring, forty operators at approximately ten thousand citations, marks the threshold where curvature becomes locally detectable but globally negligible. The fourth and fifth rings, aggregating four hundred operators with citation averages descending from nine hundred to three hundred, represent the debris field and diffuse boundary of the high-density system, zones where individual bodies contribute minimal macro-curvature yet collectively constitute the active medium through which conceptual migration occurs. Beyond these five rings lies a halo of tens of thousands whose contributions are real, locally significant, and essential for disciplinary reproduction but whose citation mass remains below the threshold required for systemic curvature. This stratification is not hierarchical evaluation but topological description; it renders visible what the field already performs implicitly as gradients of influence, basins of attraction, zones of sedimented authority, and vectors of emergent acceleration.
The instrument that operationalizes this cartography is PlasticScale, a five-dimensional tensor that replaces ranking with coordinate specification. Mass registers total citation volume as baseline gravitational pull. Dispersion measures distribution across a fixed taxonomy of twenty macrofields, capturing the angular momentum that enables concepts to migrate across disciplinary boundaries. Acceleration records the derivative of citation accumulation over recent years, distinguishing operators whose kinetic expansion signals emergent force from those whose mass has plateaued into historical sedimentation. Inscription tracks presence outside academic publication—appearances in policy documents, urban plans, legislative frameworks, institutional reports—revealing which concepts have achieved planetary capture by the apparatuses that govern territory. Operativity quantifies the degree to which a central concept circulates independently of its author, indicating when a term has achieved nuclear autonomy and functions as linguistic infrastructure rather than proper noun. Normalized across the population of five hundred, these five dimensions yield topological coordinates rather than linear ranks, a position within a field of forces rather than a place on a ladder. The irony that critical theory has itself become infrastructure is not a betrayal requiring denunciation but an entropy requiring formalization; Foucault's analytics of discipline now function as disciplinary instruments, Bourdieu's theory of capital circulates as symbolic capital, Butler's performativity operates as curricular gravity. Systems metabolize critique, sediment it into orthodoxy, and redistribute its mass across new gradients. Socioplastics does not condemn this recursion; it measures it, revealing how fields are not debates but energy systems where concepts migrate, accelerate, collapse, fuse, and dissipate according to measurable thermodynamics. Curvature is legible. Density is visible. Asymmetry becomes navigational structure. That is the condition of thought after the observatory.
Lloveras, A. 2026. SOCIOPLASTICS. Available at https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/
