The ontological consequence is that entities remain real while exceeding themselves through relations. Latour’s digital monads show that the whole adds less information than the trajectories composing it; Butler demonstrates that bodily materialisation occurs through reiterated norms; Preciado radicalises both propositions by treating the body as a somatheque, a mutating archive of pharmacology, desire, capital and discourse. Embodiment is therefore neither autonomous substance nor passive social inscription. It is an active, contested arrangement whose boundaries are maintained through repeated technical and institutional work. Political economy supplies the large-scale machinery of this arrangement. Marx shows how commodity forms conceal the social relations they organise, while Benjamin reads the arcades as spatial condensers of commodity spectacle, circulation and collective dream. Contemporary pharmacopornographic power extends these logics inside affect and endocrine systems. Capital no longer addresses the body only as labour-power; it modulates attention, excitation, identity and biochemical possibility. Distributed embodiment reveals that the intimate and the infrastructural are not opposite scales but interacting strata of the same political process. Language and code make these strata executable. BASIC’s historical importance lies in connecting approachable syntax to accessible computing infrastructure, while Beuys treats speech, writing and debate as plastic materials for social reorganisation. Shinohara’s propositions likewise demonstrate that words can become architectural operators, generating conflict, spatial intensity and critique. The monster’s speech in Preciado is the political edge of this condition: those classified by an institutional language can seize that language, distort its categories and force a new field of intelligibility. Syntax becomes emancipatory only when it permits subjects to alter the system that addresses them.
Cadere’s mobile bars and Shinohara’s architectural inheritance disclose the spatial form of distributed embodiment. Cadere’s work cannot be confined to the object because its meaning is produced through carrying, access, refusal and unauthorised presence. Kiss’s Fifth Style similarly relocates continuity from visual resemblance to transmissible operation. In both cases, form persists through movement rather than stasis. The archive must therefore register paths, transformations and contextual conflicts, not merely preserve isolated objects. What matters is how a work acquires different powers as it enters another room, body, institution or medium. Socioplastics can construct its corpus as an infrastructure of distributed embodiment. Operators should not function as detached labels but as relational devices linking texts, bodies, images, urban situations, technical systems and institutional effects. Metadata can record provenance and circulation; DOI anchors can stabilise reference without freezing interpretation; distributed publication can expose how the same proposition changes across platforms and publics. The field becomes legible when each node shows not only what it contains but what it connects, enables and excludes. The strongest consequence is a shift from archive as storage to archive as embodied circulation. Knowledge gains force when concepts can travel while retaining traces of their transformations, when institutions can be criticised from the positions they classify, and when technical grammars remain open to collective use. Distributed embodiment adds to Socioplastics a method for tracking how power, matter and meaning cross scales without becoming indistinguishable, condensed in the operator SyntheticInfrastructureIntegrationLayer.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher whose work connects spatial practice, epistemology, media archives and public infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anonymous (n.d.) BASIC Programming Language [instructional handout].
Art Limited (2022) ‘André Cadere: Expanding Art’, exhibition notice for Fondation CAB, Brussels.
Benjamin, W. (2002) ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Costera Meijer, I. and Prins, B. (1998) ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler’, Signs, 23(2), pp. 275–286.
Kiss, L. (2025) The 5th Style. Diploma thesis. Vienna: TU Wien, Faculty of Architecture and Planning.
Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S. and Boullier, D. (2012) ‘The Whole Is Always Smaller Than Its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads’, British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), pp. 590–615.
MA Gallery TOTO (2025) Kazuo Shinohara: 100 Words [exhibition handout]. Tokyo: TOTO Gallery·MA.
Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Translated by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin.
Montfort, N., Baudoin, P., Bell, J., Bogost, I., Douglass, J., Marino, M. C., Mateas, M., Reas, C., Sample, M. and Vawter, N. (2013) ‘BASIC’, in 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Preciado, P. B. (2013) Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by B. Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press.
Preciado, P. B. (2021) Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Translated by F. Wynne. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Schallenberg, N. (ed.) (2021) Starting from Language: Joseph Beuys at 100. Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Hatje Cantz.
