If coherence no longer depends upon a central origin, neither can authority. The legitimacy of a conceptual field cannot reside indefinitely in a founding declaration if every subsequent articulation contributes to its continued existence. Authority must therefore emerge from the organisation of the network itself, accumulating through the consistency with which distinctions remain operational as they circulate across expanding territories and increasingly complex relations.

Latour's notion of circulating reference demonstrates that the strength of a claim depends upon the continuity of the transformations linking it to an expanding network rather than upon the permanence of its initial formulation. Foucault shows that discourse acquires legitimacy through distributed regimes of practice, archives, and institutional conditions that exceed individual authorship. Malabou's concept of plasticity introduces the final requirement: enduring forms preserve their recognisability precisely because they remain capable of receiving, redistributing, and generating new configurations without abandoning their structural identity. These perspectives converge on a common proposition. Authority is neither inherited from origins nor guaranteed by institutions. It emerges whenever the same operational grammar continues producing compatible distinctions across new contexts without sacrificing formal precision. Every successful recurrence strengthens the field; every failed recurrence weakens its internal consistency. Socioplastics is organised according to this principle. Its elementary unit is not the proposition but the distinction; its territory is continuously produced rather than occupied; its coherence arises recursively rather than hierarchically; and its authority accumulates nowhere in particular because it is continually reconstructed everywhere the same grammar becomes operative. A conceptual system ultimately endures not because it protects an immutable beginning, but because its smallest gesture remains capable of generating an indefinitely expanding architecture of recognisable differences.

The Friction of Scalable Distinction

Conceptual force arises less from the breadth of a vocabulary than from the disciplined friction engineered into its smallest units, where a CamelTag joins two distant roots without resolving their tension so that meaning is generated in the unresolved interval rather than assigned to either term alone. This formal resistance slows automatic uptake and keeps the operator from collapsing into familiar categories, allowing each marker to isolate a single exclusive mechanism rather than a diffuse cloud of connotations; because every operator performs one precise function, several may be combined without semantic collision, producing propositions that no solitary term could sustain. When such tightly constrained units are then distributed across a rigidly numbered architecture of ten thousand nodes organised in successive tomes, books, chapters and addressable positions, individual density becomes secondary to pattern and recurrence: significance accumulates through the sheer consistency with which the same limited set of operators reappears across dispersed sites and twelve differently framed channels. Authority therefore ceases to depend on any founding statement or singular institutional decree and instead emerges from the cumulative mass of mirrored closures, each channel supplying a distinct interpretive lens that recontextualises the operators without deforming their formal identity. The resulting civic membrane grants addressability precisely because it remains coherent only while the operators continue to circulate and the channels continue to mirror one another; any rupture in that rhythm risks dissolving the field back into isolated records. In environments governed by pattern recognition rather than canonical hierarchy, durability is thus achieved not by the strength of an isolated claim but by the relentless, multi-sited reproduction of conceptual distinctions that keep the membrane permeable yet intact.

The Capacity to Leave

Assemblage theory’s most consequential claim is that the components of any formation retain a measure of autonomy: they can enter relations without being dissolved by them and, crucially, they can leave. This insistence on relations of exteriority refuses both the organic fantasy of a whole that defines its parts from within and the flattened network in which every element becomes interchangeable. Cities, knowledge systems, material practices and institutions appear instead as metastable arrangements whose temporary coherence is produced by specific articulations of bodies, discourses, techniques and affects, yet never secured against their own internal capacities for exit or recombination. The political force of the concept lies here. Stabilization—territorialization, coding, the provisional hardening of form—is always necessary for anything to function, yet it remains haunted by the possibility of deterritorialization, the line along which a component withdraws or a new alliance forms. In urban and architectural thought this tension is especially sharp: a building or a neighbourhood may appear solid, but its materials, users, regulations and atmospheres continue to hold capacities that exceed the current arrangement, capacities that can be activated under altered conditions. The risk is that the concept becomes merely descriptive, a flexible vocabulary that registers complexity without deciding anything; its value emerges only when the autonomy of components is treated as a practical and political question—what can still leave, what can still recombine, what remains possible once the current territorialization is no longer taken as final. Assemblage thinking therefore does not abolish structure; it keeps structure provisional, measured less by what an arrangement is than by what its parts can still do when the present configuration begins to loosen.

THE BLACK HOLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA — SOCIOPLASTICS 9588 — Anto Lloveras — LAPIEZA-LAB, Transdisciplinary Research Laboratory — Madrid, 2026

Social media combines intense visibility with remarkably weak public memory. A text, image or video may reach thousands of people within hours and become difficult to recover several weeks later, displaced by subsequent content, inaccessible search, deleted accounts, broken links or changes to the interface through which it originally circulated. The platform retains extensive behavioural histories for advertising, recommendation and security, yet the user often receives only rudimentary tools for navigating the intellectual record of their own participation. Publication and preservation have therefore separated. People experience posting as the placement of material into public space, while technically they are submitting it to a ranked stream whose continuity depends upon corporate databases and variable rules of display. Work on web archives shows that digital culture is not preserved merely because it was once online; meaningful access requires collection, metadata, interfaces and sustained infrastructure. VectorAfterlife concerns the trajectory that remains after the original moment of attention: whether an object can still be found, attributed, cited, exported and understood outside the interface that first accelerated it. Social networks are highly effective for announcement, reaction and redistribution, but these functions should not be confused with archival custody. Significant materials require stable copies, intelligible file names, dates, descriptive metadata and locations that do not depend entirely upon the feed. A photograph without context may survive as an image while losing the project, place and authorship that made it meaningful; a thread may be quoted widely yet become unreadable after one linked account disappears; a video may retain millions of views while its original resolution, credits or accompanying text are lost. The appropriate response is not to abandon social media or insist that every casual exchange be preserved. It is to recognise different levels of consequence. Ephemeral conversation can remain ephemeral, while work expected to support future research, cultural memory or professional continuity should be deposited elsewhere and linked into the platform rather than existing only inside it. Redundancy becomes a form of care: a public page, a repository copy, a local archive and a simple index can together resist the failure of any single system. The paradox is that societies capable of recording almost every event may leave behind a fragmented historical surface governed by what platforms found profitable to retain. The social post should therefore be understood as a temporary aperture rather than the final home of cultural material. Its speed gives work a public moment; only deliberate archival architecture gives that moment an afterlife.

Ruest, N. et al. (2021). From Archive to Analysis.

Brügger, N. (2018). The Archived Web. MIT Press.

Marttila, S. and Botero, A. (2017). Infrastructuring for Cultural Commons.

Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to Remain the Same. MIT Press.

ACCOUNTABLE INFRASTRUCTURING

Artificial intelligence becomes governable only when it is understood as an infrastructure of conversions. Cultural works become training material; labour becomes workflow; electricity becomes prediction; public archives become model capacity; language becomes a commercial service; and territorial resources become the hidden substrate of apparently weightless outputs. Each conversion redistributes visibility and power. Some actors acquire scale, speed and abstraction, while others encounter extraction, opacity or the loss of control over their own contributions. Accountability begins by refusing the final interface as the true location of the system. The prompt, newsroom tool or generated song is only the visible threshold of a much longer arrangement composed of datasets, licences, standards, data centres, grids, organisational rules, metadata and maintenance labour.

The Circulation of Forms

To name a relation is already to begin its transformation. The ten states of thought traced in Socioplastics constitute less a linear lifecycle than a topology of recurrence: a cartography of how concepts emerge, acquire density, enter circulation and eventually lose the capacity to disturb the arrangements they were created to interrogate. The strongest insight of the framework lies not in the sequence itself, but in the recognition that every stabilisation of a concept is also an act of closure, and that the ethical life of an idea depends upon the traceability of its transformations. A concept becomes operative not because it preserves complete internal coherence or remains faithful to an original intention, but because it enters a situation and alters the available field of action without claiming universal validity. It names relations, redistributes attention and makes previously inaccessible possibilities perceptible. Yet this operational success also creates the conditions of its obsolescence. Once materialised in buildings, regulations, curricula, professional protocols or database schemas, the concept no longer requires continuous explanation: the environment begins to reproduce its distinctions through ordinary use. Thought becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure tends towards fixation when budgets, legal categories, technical standards, institutional roles and maintenance routines become so interdependent that no component appears alterable in isolation.

Ontology After the Archive

After the archive, ontology no longer begins with isolated beings. It begins with records, traces, relations and conditions of retrieval. A node exists simultaneously as content, address, temporal remainder and possible connection. This distributed existence does not weaken identity; it gives identity a relational thickness. The archive becomes a philosophical instrument because it demonstrates that persistence depends on transformation across media and contexts. Socioplastics reads being as maintained difference: something remains itself by entering new assemblies without exhausting its previous meanings. The field is therefore neither a collection of objects nor a total system, but an ecology of durable and revisable positions.

This constellation approaches the archive as an active urban instrument rather than a closed storehouse.

Historical pages, moving images, people, theoretical essays and persistent records are placed beside one another so that memory can acquire new routes. The sequence moves from gravitational field conditions and Kuhnian changes of thought to the production of space, digital existence and TopolexicalSovereignty. Older monthly archives and individual labels interrupt the recent theoretical layer, demonstrating that Socioplastics was distributed before it was named as a field. Videos introduce duration and material evidence; Medium, Substack, Zenodo and Figshare provide different levels of public circulation and persistence. What binds these positions is not chronology but activation: each item retains its number and source while gaining another adjacency. The pack therefore operates as a compact city of records, where theory, biography, image and infrastructure meet without becoming homogeneous. Its purpose is to make deep material visible again and to show how an indexed past can participate in present intellectual construction.

Fuchs, C. (2018) ‘Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and the critical theory of communication’, Communication Theory, 28(4), pp. 379–400. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qty025

Fuchs extends Lefebvre’s theory into the domain of communication by treating symbolic exchange as a form of social production embedded in spatial and economic relations. His iconic argument is that communication is neither immaterial circulation nor autonomous discourse; it depends upon human labour, technological infrastructures, institutional power and commodified environments. The theoretical contribution joins Lefebvre’s humanist Marxism to Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, foregrounding the communicative commons as both produced capacity and object of enclosure. Methodologically, Fuchs reconstructs concepts from The Production of Space and the Critique of Everyday Life, then applies them to media systems without reducing communication to content analysis. The conceptual operation is materialisation: messages, platforms and public discourse are relocated within the conditions that make them possible. The wider bridge reaches political economy of media, digital labour, critical infrastructure studies and urban communication. Communication becomes spatial practice, while communicative space appears as a field whose accessibility, ownership and rhythms are organised through conflict.

Geddes, P. (1915) Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics. London: Williams & Norgate.

Geddes conceives the city as an evolving relation among place, work and folk rather than an object available for formal correction. His iconic idea is “survey before plan”: civic intervention must arise from sustained observation of regional geography, social organisation, historical continuity and everyday culture. The theoretical contribution is an ecological urbanism avant la lettre, in which town planning becomes a branch of civics and civic life a form of collective learning. Methodologically, Geddes combines regional survey, comparative exhibition, historical interpretation and constructive action, rejecting the division between science, education, politics and design. The conceptual operation is diagnostic cultivation: the planner does not impose an external order but identifies latent capacities within an existing urban organism and develops them through selective transformation. The wider bridge reaches human geography, sociology, education and environmental planning. Geddes’s importance lies less in organic metaphor than in the institutional form of his method, which makes knowledge production, public participation and spatial design parts of one continuous civic process.

Elden, S. (2007) ‘There is a politics of space because space is political: Henri Lefebvre and the production of space’, Radical Philosophy Review, 10(2), pp. 101–116.

Elden insists that Lefebvre’s spatial theory must be read as a philosophical and political project at once. Its iconic proposition is that space is political not merely because conflicts occur within it, but because its production already embodies power, abstraction and historical struggle. The theoretical contribution arises from holding together the Marxian problem of production and a broader ontology of space that exceeds conventional political economy. Lefebvre’s synthesis of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger allows material practices, conceptual representations and lived experience to be treated as internally related dimensions rather than separate domains. Methodologically, Elden reconstructs this genealogy to prevent the spatial triad from becoming a simplified analytical template. The conceptual operation is politicisation at the level of ontology: space is neither neutral container nor passive effect, but an active medium through which social relations acquire durability. The wider bridge reaches political theory, geography, philosophy and historiography by demonstrating that a politics of space requires analysis of how histories, categories and material arrangements become spatially instituted.

Stanek, Ł. (2007) ‘Methodologies and situations of urban research: Re-reading Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 4, pp. 461–465.

Stanek retrieves The Production of Space as a research practice grounded in historical situations rather than as an abstract theory detached from empirical work. His iconic contribution is to reconnect Lefebvre’s conceptual triads with studies of housing, new towns, rural transformation and everyday life, showing that philosophical propositions emerged from concrete investigative settings. The theoretical contribution lies in presenting space as simultaneously material, represented and lived, while refusing to stabilise these dimensions into a closed system. Methodologically, Stanek reconstructs Lefebvre’s movement between sociology, Marxism, architectural critique and political engagement, emphasising the researcher’s own situatedness within the spatial processes examined. The conceptual operation is recursive: urban research becomes part of the production of space it analyses. The wider bridge reaches historiography, architectural theory, ethnography and reflexive social science. Lefebvre’s method thereby appears less as a doctrine than as a transdisciplinary procedure for moving between scales, sources and situations without surrendering the political antagonisms through which spatial knowledge is formed.

Brenner, N. (2000) ‘The urban question as a scale question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, urban theory and the politics of scale’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24(2), pp. 361–378.

Brenner reformulates the urban question as a struggle over the production and reorganisation of geographical scale. His iconic idea is that globalisation does not dissolve territory into a homogeneous world space; it generates a contradictory “explosion of spaces” in which urban, regional, national and supranational scales are continually rearranged. The theoretical contribution extends Lefebvre’s spatial dialectic by treating scale not as a pre-given ladder but as a historically produced and politically contested configuration. Methodologically, Brenner reads capitalist restructuring through the simultaneous processes of integration, fragmentation, polarisation and reterritorialisation, connecting institutional change to transformed urban regions. The conceptual operation is rescaling: apparently local urban processes become intelligible as moments within broader reorganisations of state power and accumulation. The wider bridge reaches political geography, state theory, globalisation studies and critical urbanism. The city consequently ceases to be a bounded object and becomes a strategic site through which scalar hierarchies are constructed, destabilised and temporarily fixed.

Bergson, H. (1911) Matter and Memory. Translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Bergson’s Matter and Memory dismantles the assumption that perception is a passive representation stored inside the mind. Its iconic proposition is that perception belongs to action: the body selects from the material world what is relevant to its possible movements, while memory inserts duration, difference and virtuality into the present. The theoretical contribution lies in refusing both reductive materialism and detached idealism. Matter is an aggregate of images, consciousness is not external to it, and memory cannot be localised as a cerebral deposit without losing its temporal structure. Methodologically, Bergson proceeds through conceptual differentiation, separating habit-memory from pure recollection and perception from remembrance in order to reconstruct their dynamic cooperation. The operation is subtractive rather than accumulative: perception does not fabricate the world but filters its inexhaustible field according to embodied interest. The wider bridge reaches phenomenology, cognitive theory, cinema and spatial practice by establishing that environments are apprehended through temporally layered capacities for action rather than through neutral optical reception.

Intellectual Precedents and Structural Affinities of Socioplastics

Socioplastics belongs to no single intellectual lineage. Its closest precedents emerge instead from a constellation of relational philosophy, spatial theory, epistemology, conceptual art, systems thinking and archival practice. Spinoza, Whitehead, Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze and Latour provide its strongest ontological affinity: entities are not autonomous substances but provisional stabilisations of relations, capacities, durations and associations. Foucault, Haraway, Bowker and Star, Stiegler and Kuhn clarify its epistemology of mediation, showing how formats, classifications, technical supports and institutional thresholds determine what can become visible, credible or thinkable. Yet Socioplastics does not simply restate relationality or situated knowledge. Through operators such as AuthorityFragment, FormatAdmission, PersistenceRemake, EvidenceAmbiguity and PerceptionDelay, it converts general philosophical propositions into compact mechanisms that can be identified, compared and recombined.

Rakova, B. and Dobbe, R. (2023) ‘Algorithms as social-ecological-technological systems: An environmental justice lens on algorithmic audits’, Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 491–511. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594014

Rakova and Dobbe reject the fiction that algorithms are bounded technical objects. Their iconic proposition is ontological: algorithmic systems are indistinct from the social, ecological and technological relations through which they are produced and made effective. The theoretical contribution is a Social-Ecological-Technological Systems framework for environmental-justice-oriented auditing, replacing narrow evaluation of code or datasets with analysis of emergent couplings, infrastructural dependencies and place-specific harms. Methodologically, the paper translates environmental justice traditions into an audit framework that broadens inputs, opens outputs, secures access to redress and requires relational, situated assessment. Its conceptual operation is boundary dissolution: impact is relocated from the artefact to the ecosystem of institutions, materials, labour, energy and communities that sustain it. The wider bridge reaches STS, critical algorithm studies, environmental governance and design justice. Audit consequently becomes a political process of defining the system under examination, determining who possesses standing, and establishing which ecological and social consequences count as remediable harm.

Chang, C.H. et al. (2024) ‘A global evidence map of human well-being and biodiversity co-benefits and trade-offs of natural climate solutions’, preprint manuscript.

Chang and collaborators confront an evidential field too large and dispersed for conventional synthesis. Their iconic idea is a global map of the co-impacts of natural climate solutions, assembled by using language models to screen more than two million articles and identify over 257,000 relevant studies. The theoretical contribution is to detach climate mitigation from carbon singularity: ecosystem interventions must be understood through biodiversity and human-well-being co-benefits, trade-offs and geographical asymmetries. Methodologically, machine learning becomes an instrument of evidence architecture, extracting locations, pathways, species and impact variables at a scale unattainable through manual review alone. The operation is cartographic redistribution of attention: it exposes mismatches between regions of high mitigation potential and regions of dense research, revealing that evidence abundance is itself unevenly produced. The wider bridge links conservation science, computational review, climate policy and postcolonial knowledge geography. The map therefore does more than organise literature; it makes visible how research capacity conditions which ecological futures can be justified, financed and governed.

Castellar, J.A.C., Popartan, L.A., Pueyo-Ros, J., Atanasova, N., Langergraber, G., Säumel, I., Corominas, L., Comas, J. and Acuña, V. (2021) ‘Nature-based solutions in the urban context: Terminology, classification and scoring for urban challenges and ecosystem services’, Science of the Total Environment, 779, 146237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.146237

Castellar and colleagues address the conceptual instability that accompanies the rapid institutionalisation of nature-based solutions. Their iconic contribution is a common classificatory architecture: thirty-two interventions are consolidated and organised through categories capable of distinguishing stand-alone units from broader systems and strategies. The theoretical advance lies in showing that terminology is not secondary to implementation. Without shared distinctions, heterogeneous projects cannot be compared, assessed or mainstreamed across policy environments. Methodologically, the study combines elicitation workshops, web-based surveys, hierarchical clustering, qualitative performance scoring, principal component analysis and evenness measures across four European projects. Its conceptual operation is infrastructural classification: naming establishes an interoperable field through which ecosystem services and urban challenges can be aligned without erasing functional difference. The wider bridge reaches STS, ecological engineering, policy standardisation and knowledge organisation. Classification appears here as a practical technology of coordination, capable of enabling transdisciplinary action while simultaneously determining which forms of urban nature become institutionally recognisable, fundable and reproducible.

Pinto, D.M., Russo, D.D. and Sudoso, A.M. (2025) ‘Optimal placement of nature-based solutions for urban challenges’, arXiv:2502.11065.

Pinto, Russo and Sudoso treat urban greening as a problem of distributive configuration rather than simple provision. Their iconic idea is that parks, trees, green roofs and related interventions acquire environmental value through placement, clustering, accessibility and interaction with existing hazards. The theoretical contribution is an operational account of nature-based solutions in which multifunctionality must be reconciled with physical constraints and fairness. Methodologically, a mixed-integer linear programming model integrates ground temperature, air quality, access, convolution effects and equity criteria to identify spatial allocations that maximise combined benefits. The conceptual operation is optimisation under justice constraints: urban nature becomes a finite and strategically placed infrastructure whose outcomes depend upon the objective function chosen. Its wider bridge connects operational research, climate adaptation, landscape planning and environmental justice. The paper is especially significant because it makes normative priorities computationally explicit; fairness is not appended after technical efficiency but enters the model as a parameter capable of changing where environmental benefits are produced and who can reach them.

Afroogh, S., Mostafavi, A. and Jiao, J. (2024) ‘Intelligent Environmental Empathy (IEE): A new power and platform to fostering green obligation for climate peace and justice’, arXiv:2410.21536.

Afroogh, Mostafavi and Jiao position empathy as an infrastructural force rather than a private sentiment. Their iconic proposal, Intelligent Environmental Empathy, combines affective obligation with a decentralised artificial-intelligence platform intended to counter free-riding and the limitations of top-down climate governance. The theoretical contribution lies in framing climate injustice through teleological, axiological, causal and social-epistemic failures, thereby treating insufficient motivation and unequal knowledge as structural components of environmental conflict. Methodologically, the paper constructs a normative-operational model in which citizens, planners and local administrators become nodes within a technologically mediated ecology of obligation. Its conceptual operation is the conversion of empathy into governance capacity: moral perception is designed to circulate, coordinate and exert pressure across scales. The wider bridge reaches climate ethics, platform governance, participatory planning and political theory. Its ambition also exposes a central tension in technologically mediated solidarity: a platform designed to cultivate obligation may broaden collective agency, yet it may equally encode contested values into opaque systems of behavioural coordination.