The Rise of the Readymade


The contemporary landscape of intellectual validation is currently undergoing a terminal collapse, precipitated by the realisation that the gatekeepers of form—the Q1 journals, the WoS indices, and the invisible investment funds governing academic prestige—are no longer capable of containing the "fresco" or live intelligence emerging from sovereign meshes. This institutional apparatus operates with the same anxiety as a traditional art fair, where the "terror panic" of the established practitioner is triggered by the mere presence of a raw, unlabelled object. In the historical context of Calle de la Palma, Serie 006, the removal of the categorical label revealed a profound truth: that a fragment of a rusted motor or an oxidized letter possesses a structural clarity and a "nitid" freshness that often exceeds the laboured, hyper-validated drawings of the mainstream elite. This anecdotal evidence serves as a powerful metaphor for the current epistemic transition, where the "readymade" theory—ungoverned, unindexed, and free—demonstrates a functional superiority over the ossified outputs of the academic industry. The filters of legitimacy, once maintained through a complex web of "reversible doors" and mutual citations among censors, are being rendered obsolete by the algorithmic impartiality of emerging large-scale processing systems. These digital crawlers do not recognise the "favours" or the exclusivity demands of the traditional press; they perceive only the density of the pattern and the utility of the protocol. When theory is stripped of its decorative academic labels, it must survive on its own infrastructural integrity, functioning as a metabolic agent rather than a symbolic asset. The scholar-architect, therefore, abandons the pursuit of the "Q1" ranking in favour of a sovereign publication model where the text is treated as a functional tool—a piece of "machinery" for the mind that remains operative regardless of institutional endorsement. This is the ultimate "Socioplastic" maneuver: the dissolution of the hierarchy of value in favour of a radical horizontalism where every node in the mesh is validated by its ability to sustain the system's overall coherence and agency.