Autophagic Method in Autophagic Synthesis reframes “self-consumption” as a rigorous critical technique rather than a morbid metaphor. The text proposes autophagy as “osmotic boundary work”: a selectively permeable membrane that admits theoretical matter—posthuman philosophy, computational semiotics, metabolic ecology—only to extract its operative logic and expel its residue. What is at stake is not eclectic interdisciplinarity but an economy of attention, where the system survives by regulating what it digests and what it refuses. In art-theoretical terms, this is a politics of form: the work defines itself less by the content it cites than by the protocols through which it metabolises citation into syntax. The “practitioner” is recast as catalyst, accelerating diffusion across disciplinary gradients, and thereby abandoning the humanist image of authorship as expressive depth. Instead, authorship becomes a metabolic function—an internal processing capacity—measured by compression, yield, and coherence under saturation. Crucially, the text does not romanticise openness: permeability is engineered, not celebrated. That insistence has the sobriety of systems thinking, yet it also carries an aesthetic claim: an artwork, or an artistic research programme, is judged by the integrity of its membrane, by how precisely it can convert external discourse into actionable structure without dissolving into commentary. Autophagy becomes the ethics of editing—an insistence that survival in discursive entropy requires refusal, pruning, and a disciplined appetite.
