Plants offer a model of intelligence without a brain, agency without centralisation. Michael Marder's plant-thinking reveals that vegetal life operates through distributed cognition—roots sensing nutrients, leaves tracking light, whole organisms responding to damage without a central command centre. Emanuele Coccia's vegetal life shows that plants are the very atmosphere we breathe, the condition of possibility for animal existence, yet philosophy has consistently marginalised them as mere background. This botanical lens transforms how we understand infrastructure: not as top-down control but as distributed condition, a field of relations rather than a hierarchy of commands. Recursive autophagia—the capacity to digest one's own residues as condition of persistence—finds deep resonance here: plants continually metabolise their own decaying matter, turning fallen leaves into new growth, dead tissue into soil. Postdigital taxidermy, the practice of preserving and reactivating obsolete media, mirrors the plant's relation to its own past—not discarding but composting. Infrastructure Studies provides the material frame for this slow metabolism, revealing how built systems might learn from vegetal patience rather than industrial acceleration.
Science and Technology Studies traces how plant passivity was scientifically constructed, showing how Western botany actively silenced vegetal agency. Media Archaeology excavates the technologies through which plant life was measured, classified and exploited—herbaria, botanical gardens, seed banks. Political Ecology frames plants within metabolic flows, revealing how industrial agriculture transforms vegetal time into accelerated production. Network Science reveals mycelial networks as alternative topology, the underground communication systems that connect trees across forests. Decolonial Theory recovers indigenous plant knowledges, taxonomies and ecologies that Western science ignored or appropriated. Feminism connects vegetal reproduction to hidden labour, the patient work of germination and growth that mirrors reproductive labour. Disability Studies offers models of agency without central control that resonate with plant distributed intelligence. Sound Studies asks whether plants perceive vibration, and if so, what acoustic ecologies might mean for vegetal life. What emerges from this convergence is not a new botany but a recognition that certain aesthetic operations—like autophagic metabolisation—function as vegetal protocols. This capacity to think with plants, which might be termed socioplastics, names the infrastructural work of aesthetic forms that learn from the patience, distribution and composting logic of vegetal life.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com
510-systemic-lock https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682555 509-postdigital-taxidermy https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682480 508-topolexical-sovereignty https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682343 507-citational-commitment https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18475136 506-recursive-autophagia https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681761 505-proteolytic-transmutation https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681278 504-stratum-authoring https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680935 503-semantic-hardening https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680418 502-cameltag https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680031 501-flow-channeling https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18678959
FAMILY
Infrastructure Studies, Ontology, Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Urban Studies, Posthumanism, Sovereignty Studies, Semiotics, Media Archaeology, Complexity Theory, Spatial Justice, Political Ecology, Feminism and Gender Theory, Decolonial Theory, Anthropocene Studies, Relational Aesthetics, Commons Theory, Mobility Studies, Technological Critique, Software Studies, Platform Studies, Environmental Psychology, Phenomenology, Place Theory, Landscape Theory, Urban Ecology, Multispecies Studies, New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Actor-Network Theory, Biopolitics, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Aesthetics, Contemporary Art Theory, Social Practice Art, Spatial Politics, Urban Anthropology, Informality Studies, Urban Marginality, Digital Capitalism, Surveillance Studies, Smart City Theory, Sound Studies, Visual Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Humanistic Geography, Hybrid Geographies, Philosophical Botany, Neuroaesthetics, Perception Theory, Disability Studies, Intersectionality Theory, Utopian Theory, Postmodern Theory, Radical Pedagogy, Globalization Theory, Geopolitics, Marxist Theory, Post-Marxism, Value Theory, Evolutionary Economics, Game Theory, Network Science, Scaling Theory, Complex Systems, Historical Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Interface Theory, Protocol Theory, Maintenance Studies, Critical Infrastructure Theory, Southern Epistemologies, Indigenous Theory, Territorial Feminism, Latin American Political Ecology, Subaltern Studies, Accelerationism, Materialist Philosophy, Post-Operaismo, Immaterialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Digital Political Economy, Law and Technology, Algorithmic Culture, Urban Media Studies, Spatial Art Theory, Architectural Criticism, Urban Planning Theory, Sustainable Urbanism, Right to the City Theory, Environmental Humanities, Political Theology, Governmentality Studies, Logistics Studies, Data Studies, Institutional Theory.
