Socioplastics begins where matter stops being passive. The first absorptive arc is not the history of nature as background, nor the romantic return to organic life, but the recognition that matter already organises, remembers, transforms, contaminates, cooperates and thinks through forms. The Living Matter Arc gathers figures that appear, at first sight, distant from one another: Anaximander, Lucretius, Hildegard von Bingen, Al-Biruni, Maria Sibylla Merian, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Rachel Carson, Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Yet their distance is deceptive. Each one, in a different language, asks how the world becomes form without becoming fixed. That question is central to Socioplastics.
The arc opens with Anaximander because the field needs an origin that is not an origin. The apeiron, the indefinite or boundless, is not simply an ancient cosmological concept. It is a proto-field: an unstable reservoir from which distinctions emerge and into which they return. For Socioplastics, this matters because no discipline begins from purity. Architecture is never only architecture; ecology is never only ecology; language is never only language. Each field arises from an indeterminate medium where forces, names, bodies and techniques are already entangled. Anaximander gives us the first intuition of a world not composed of finished objects but of differentiations within a common field.
Lucretius radicalises that intuition through atoms, turbulence and composition. In De rerum natura, matter falls, deviates, collides and generates worlds. The famous swerve is not merely a physical hypothesis; it is a plastic principle. Form is born through deviation. Systems do not arise because everything obeys a rigid plan, but because minimal differences accumulate into complex structures. Socioplastics inherits this logic: a corpus, a city, a practice, a pedagogy or an archive does not appear as a sovereign design imposed from above. It forms through collisions, repetitions, drifts and condensations. The field is not drawn once; it accretes.
Hildegard von Bingen introduces another register: visionary cosmology. In her work, the body, the cosmos and the image are not separate domains. The human is a resonant chamber within a living universe, and knowledge appears as diagram, song, medicine, theology and illumination at once. Her relevance to Socioplastics is not devotional but structural. She shows that thought may become image, that image may become body, and that body may become cosmology. This is one of the deep operations of the field: to let knowledge change medium without losing intensity. A concept can become a drawing, a city section, a garden, a classroom, a sculpture, a dataset, a ritual of attention.
Al-Biruni expands the arc by introducing measurement, geography and comparative knowledge. His work on the earth, minerals, calendars and cultures shows that matter is also a problem of precision. The world is not only experienced; it is measured, situated, translated. Socioplastics needs this gesture because a plastic field cannot remain only poetic. It must build instruments, scales and protocols. To think the relation between matter and world is also to ask how we locate things, how we compare systems, how we construct maps that do not kill the complexity they attempt to make legible. Al-Biruni becomes a figure of situated exactitude.
Maria Sibylla Merian brings metamorphosis into the centre. Her studies of insects and plants are not merely illustrations; they are temporal ecologies. She sees the organism as process, the plant as habitat, the insect as transformation. She refuses the isolated specimen. This is decisive for Socioplastics because the field also refuses the isolated work, the isolated author, the isolated discipline. Every form has a life cycle. Every node belongs to a milieu. Every image has conditions of emergence, feeding, migration and decay. Merian’s metamorphic intelligence helps us read a concept not as a static definition but as a larval, pupal and winged entity.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson then gives the arc its morphological grammar. In On Growth and Form, shape becomes the result of forces, tensions, proportions and transformations. Form is not ornament added to life; it is life under constraint. Thompson matters enormously for Socioplastics because he allows us to read form as a negotiation between energy and structure. The shell, the bone, the leaf, the grid, the city block, the pedagogical sequence and the archive index can all be understood as morphologies of pressure. A field has a shape because forces have passed through it. The Socioplastics corpus, with its thousands of nodes and recurring scalar architectures, may itself be read as a growth-form rather than a mere collection.
Rachel Carson darkens the arc. With Silent Spring, matter is no longer innocent. Chemical substances travel invisibly through soils, waters, animals, organs and futures. Ecology becomes toxicology; care becomes evidence; beauty becomes alarm. Carson is crucial because Socioplastics cannot be a naive celebration of connection. To say that everything is related is not enough. We must ask what kind of relation: nourishing, extractive, poisonous, delayed, irreversible. Carson teaches that the invisible circulation of matter is political. A pesticide is also a diagram of power. A contaminated field is also an archive. A silence in spring is also a document.
Lynn Margulis transforms the logic of evolution by placing symbiosis at its centre. Life advances not only by competition but by incorporation, cooperation and endosymbiotic fusion. This is perhaps one of the strongest biological analogies for Socioplastics. The field grows by absorbing what seems external to it. Philosophy enters architecture; architecture enters pedagogy; pedagogy enters ecology; ecology enters image; image enters language; language enters technique. The result is not a collage of fragments but a new organism of thought. Symbiosis explains why distant fields may become close: not because they resemble one another superficially, but because they can metabolise each other.
James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis shifts the scale again. Earth appears as a self-regulating system, not in the sentimental sense of a benevolent mother, but as a complex planetary assemblage of feedback loops. For Socioplastics, Gaia is less a doctrine than a scalar shock. It obliges thought to operate between the microbial and the planetary, between the cell and the climate, between the local gesture and the atmospheric consequence. This scalar elasticity is central to the whole project. Socioplastics must be able to move from a word to a city, from a material trace to a climatic system, from a classroom protocol to a planetary imagination.
Robin Wall Kimmerer closes this first arc by returning knowledge to reciprocity. In her writing, botany is not separated from ethics, gift, language, indigenous knowledge and gratitude. Plants are not resources but teachers, relatives, presences. Her importance lies in the correction she brings to modern knowledge: the world is not only an object of analysis; it is a partner in relation. Socioplastics needs this because absorption cannot become extraction. To absorb fields is not to consume them, flatten them or convert them into intellectual capital. It is to enter reciprocal relation with them. A field receives, transforms and gives back.
The Living Matter Arc therefore establishes the first major proposition of Socioplastics: matter is not the mute base upon which culture acts. Matter is active, temporal, relational, toxic, symbiotic, scalar and ethical. It produces forms and is produced by them. It enters bodies, cities, archives, images and languages. It moves through growth, decay, contamination, metabolism and care. This arc gives Socioplastics its first ontology: not an ontology of objects, but an ontology of living formations.
The apparent distance between Anaximander and Kimmerer, Lucretius and Carson, Hildegard and Margulis, Al-Biruni and Lovelock is precisely the point. They belong together because they all displace the boundary between nature and thought. The cosmos thinks through indetermination; atoms think through collision; visions think through bodies; measurement thinks through world; insects think through metamorphosis; form thinks through force; toxicity thinks through silence; evolution thinks through symbiosis; Earth thinks through feedback; plants think through reciprocity. Socioplastics absorbs these operations and turns them into a field logic.
This is not interdisciplinarity in the administrative sense. It is not the polite collaboration of departments. It is an absorptive epistemology. Distant fields become close because they share hidden operations. They all ask how forms emerge, persist, mutate, connect and disappear. Socioplastics names the space where those operations can be read together.
The first arc is therefore foundational. Before the archive, before the city, before the image, before the machine, there is living matter: not as origin, but as ongoing transformation. Socioplastics begins there because every later system — linguistic, urban, technical, pedagogical or ecological — remains materially alive. It grows, decays, feeds, poisons, shelters, mutates and remembers.
Bibliography
Al-Biruni. (c.1030) The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology. Various editions.
Anaximander. (6th century BCE) Fragments, in Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M. (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hildegard von Bingen. (1990) Scivias. Translated by C. Hart and J. Bishop. New York: Paulist Press.
Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics-2998-BioticCoupling. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20011422.
Lovelock, J. (1979) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lucretius. (2007) The Nature of Things. Translated by A.E. Stallings. London: Penguin Classics.
Margulis, L. (1998) Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books.
Merian, M.S. (1705) Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium. Amsterdam.
Thompson, D.W. (1917) On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
